(圖片來源：Wikimedia Commons，美國知名智庫Brookings Institute。)
The minority government of President Chen Shui-bian has no lack of indiscreet cabinet ministers or top officials with an equal rank.But the very strange thing is that, whereas top government officials are sacked or forced to resign in democracies like Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, ours are kept in office or, more often than not, get promoted.
One good example to accentuate the latter case is Chen Tang Sun.He compared Singapore to a piece of nose dirt and chided its foreign minister with “reverently holding the ‘lam pa’ or eggs (testicles)” of the Chinese.He made the gaffe, which gave rise to a popular idiomatic use of “LP” – the initials of lam pa pronounced as well as written in English – meaning “to curry favor with” or “toady to,” while he was foreign minister.He stayed in that office for quite some time before he was promoted secretary to President Chen.He is secretary-general of the National Security Council now.
That encouraged his former colleague, Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng, to act and speak indiscreetly, his latest antics being to challenge opposition lawmakers to prove he was asleep when he was caught dozing on TV camera while attending a briefing for President Chen on damages Typhoon Krosa had inflicted on Taiwan.“I was fully awake,” Tu told the legislators who questioned him at a Legislative Yuan committee meeting.“I was just closing my eyes, and how come you know that I was asleep?” he went on, adding:“I heard every word said at the briefing.”When another opposition legislator was panning Premier Chang Chun-hsiung on the floor of the legislature, Tu who was bracing for another broadside started picking his nose, as if it were – in the words of a TV reporter who caught the indiscretion on camera – his enemy who was, of course, the questioning legislator.
Then it’s Tu’s new colleague, Government Information Office director-general Shieh Jhy-wei, who came out to defend him.Shieh said before another Legislative Yuan committee meeting Tu was “merely thumbing his nose” or “pooh-poohing.”His actual utterance in Chinese was “chi zhi i bi,” which means literally “to laugh with one’s nose (at someone).”It is a pure coincidence that the nose is used in the idioms both in Chinese and English and that the education minister was picking his nose in preparation for facing the hostile lawmaker.For that gaffe alone Shieh may have secured his job just as Tu has been able to keep his for years.
But none of them outdid President Chen, who claimed he was able to survive a soft coup d’etat masterminded by a number of retired generals, thanks to an amulet he had never parted with.He charged the retirees with attempting to persuade their former colleagues still on active duty to resign en mass to start that coup, which aimed, though he did not say in so many words, at toppling him.
With Chen as president, no wonder top public office holders have to rival each other for committing indiscretions, not knowing one indiscreet remark at the wrong moment could ruin the whole plan.
（本文刊載於96.10.15 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
胡思聰
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2007年6月12日 09:50
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2018年4月17日 16:11
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王順民
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