07.24.06

The DPP: Now one big happy family

Posted in News at 6:06 pm by David

The DPP held their annual conference over the weekend, and the big news was that they have voted to abolish their factions:

The decision [to abolish factions] was adopted at the party’s 12th national congress that opened the previous day, with 153 of the 279 delegates present at the session giving a thumps-up to the resolution. Most members of the party’s decision-making Central Standing Committee, including Vice President Annette Lu, Presidential Office Secretary-General Tan Sun Chen and acting Kaohsiung Mayor Yeh Chu-lan, lent their support to the resolution,initiated by Legislator Wang Hsing-nan.

The DPP has always been a horribly divided party - with internal battles between the different factions an on-going issue. The idea of abolishing them was a major issue during the DPP Chairmanship elections last December, and it seems it gained enough support to be pushed through.

I doubt that this will have any major short-term effect, as the people who used to be in the same faction are still likely to group themselves together informally. However, over the long-term, there is the possibility that DPP members might actually start thinking for themselves a bit more, without waiting to be told by their faction head what they should be thinking. As an outsider, I’ve always been amazed at the power the different factions exercised - so I think this is a positive move.
There’s another perspective on this over at Mutantfrog travelogues.

Incidentally, I had better things to do over the weekend than follow the DPP conference, but the snippets I saw on TV all seemed to be people giving speeches in Taiwanese. I found myself wondering whether I would join the DPP if I was a Hakka or 48′er who fully supported all their policies …

Final note: It’s a cheap shot by the China Post, but still amusing:

Another DPP lawmaker described the decision is similar to “driving the legal prostitution houses” underground.

The remarks immediately drew strong protest from a group of sex workers, who claimed that they have much higher moral standards than both the DPP and President Chen Shui-bian.

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5 Comments

  1. sun bin said,

    July 25, 2006 at 12:22 pm

    i came across the cheap shot recording :) — of course from some pro-blue site. but one got to be impressed by the speech…
    http://now5511.myweb.hinet.net/x10k.wma

  2. Sun Bin said,

    July 25, 2006 at 7:41 pm

    policy of abolishing party factions to abolishing licensed prostitution, both achieves nothing but only pushed the activities underground. You would think that DPP member was criticising his own party. The prostitutes do not agree. For background see Jujuflop.

  3. wolf reinhold said,

    July 25, 2006 at 9:14 pm

    “Incidentally, I had better things to do over the weekend than follow the DPP conference, but the snippets I saw on TV all seemed to be people giving speeches in Taiwanese. I found myself wondering whether I would join the DPP if I was a Hakka or 48′er who fully supported all their policies …”

    Or if I should start studying that language….

  4. Jason said,

    July 26, 2006 at 4:39 am

    Damn, that slogan’s a mouthful!

    (Insert your own sex worker joke here)