Good Leaders and Good Government



September 24, October 4, 1974


Number One


Recently several letter writers have referred to the courageous leadership in Singapore and Malaysia. By implication at least, these writers have criticized the leaders of Taiwan and the U.S., among others, for a lack of courage. In making such comparisons, one must recognize that these countries have vastly different forms of government. Singapore and Malaysia have dictatorships; Taiwan and the U.S. have constitutional democracies. Singapore and Malaysian leaders can decide on national and domestic policy whether the people agree or not. This gives them the strength to stand up against any bully without having to worry about their financial support in the upcoming election. Among other things this means that they don't have to worry, at least directly, about large companies losing out on their foreign investments.


Since 1988, Taiwan has gradually been putting its constitutional democracy into effect. As this has happened, the president has been increasingly forced to face political reality. If he/she doesn't please business, he/she won't get the money needed to run a successful campaign for re-election.


Taiwan (and the U.S.) should not feel ashamed of this. It is the nature of a good constitutional democracy that its leaders are weak. Taiwan should feel proud that it had the strength and wisdom to discard dictatorship. Although dictatorship can bring strength of will, we only have to look across the Taiwan Strait (or at the history of the "Taiwanese") to see the kind of misery it can also bring.


Number 2


In my letter of September 28, I wrote that strong constitutional democracies have weak leaders. I wrote further that Taiwan should not be ashamed that its current leaders are weak but proud of its constitutional democracy. In a reply, Mr. D. Lin says that a country need not be a dictatorship for its leaders to be assertive. Therefore, constitutional democracy does not imply weak leadership. He points to Churchill and Roosevelt during World War II as exemplifying strong leaders of democratic governments. And he writes that the governments of Singapore and Malaysia are modeled after the British parliamentary system. He also writes that "no American can be proud of the Clinton administration's reversal of policy of most favored nation status toward mainland China."


I would like to comment on these points. On Roosevelt and Churchill, both had emergency war powers. Many of Roosevelt's early pre-war acts were unconstitutional and would have been overturned by the courts during a normal peacetime, as some were following World War II. To refute my argument, Mr. Lin would identify strong, assertive peacetime leaders of constitutional democracies.


Mr. Lin's comparison of England with Singapore and Malaysia is overdrawn and not relevant to my argument. In the first place, the power of prime minister John Major is far more limited than that of the current Singapore and Malaysian leaders, partly as a result of decades of tradition. In the second place, England does not have a constitutional democracy.


It is true that Clinton reversed his presidential campaign policy on mainland China. However, he did not reverse U.S. policy. Whoever was elected president would have faced similar political pressures regarding China. As an outsider, Clinton did not realize how much political support he would lose from business if he withdrew most favored nation status for communist China. The fact that Clinton was forced into this position is not evidence of Clinton's weakness but of the weakness of anyone who happened to be in his position. It is a weakness that stems from the need to please voters and special interests in order to be elected next time. There is nothing here for the people of the U.S. to be ashamed of. On the contrary, they can be proud that no president has the power to abruptly change policy, since other things equal, abrupt changes make for an unstable business environment. In other words, Americans can be proud of they are in a system of the rule of law as opposed to the rule of people.


Mr. Lin says that "we Chinese feel humiliated by the Olympic Council's withdrawal of its invitation to the ROC president." I doubt it. But if someone does indeed feel this way, he should not blame his feeling on the lack of assertiveness of the present leaders. He should blame the previous assertive Taiwan leaders who failed to recognize the reality of the nationalists' defeat by the communists. If two parties make governance claims to the territory occupied for many years and controlled militarily by the other, the weaker of the two can hardly expect to be treated on a par in world politics with the stronger.



Copyright © 1996 by James Patrick Gunning


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J. Patrick Gunning
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