這篇報導最主要分析阿扁當選一年後所遭遇到的困境
紐約時報認為最大的問題就是出在在野的國親兩黨
請看標題
Taiwan Chief Fails to Loosen Old Guard's Grip on Power

其中一段內容:

With the legislature controlled by the Nationalists,
由於立法院由國民黨操控

the bureaucracy still loyal to the party,
而政府機關也都是忠於國民黨

and China courting its leaders to the exclusion of the president,
而中國政府也對國民黨領導者猛獻殷勤將陳水扁總統排除在外

Mr. Chen has become an isolated, ineffectual figure.
陳總統只能成為孤立無援的無能總統

不知道台灣有哪家報紙登了這篇文章
就算登了大概只登胡忠信批評阿扁的那一段
對國親兩黨的惡行隻字不提吧

這就是我們的媒體...

March 5, 2001

Taiwan Chief Fails to Loosen Old Guard's Grip on Power

By MARK LANDLER

TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 1 A year ago this month, voters here made history by sweeping the Nationalist Party out of power for the first time in 55 years ?or, at least, so they thought.

After the most fleeting of honeymoons, President Chen Shui-bian and his supporters are finding how hard it is to govern a country that was run for decades as the wholly-owned subsidiary of a once-impregnable party.

With the legislature controlled by the Nationalists, the bureaucracy still loyal to the party, and China courting its leaders to the exclusion of the president, Mr. Chen has become an isolated, ineffectual figure.

"I was very na鴳e," said Lee Yuen- tseh, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and friend of Mr. Chen. "I thought that if you rotated power, you could solve the problem. But the new party has a lot to learn in running the country."

Hu Chong-shinn, an informal adviser to Mr. Chen, recently published a book assessing the first year of the Chen presidency. While not quite a political obituary, the book, "The Arrogance of Power," lays out a litany of failures.

Last month, Mr. Chen, an earnest lawyer and native Taiwanese, was forced by the Nationalists to reverse his only bold move since taking office last May: halting construction of a partly-built nuclear power plant.

The retreat demoralized his Democratic Progressive Party, which is fervently opposed to nuclear power, and the four-month battle paralyzed the government, rattled investors and halted Taiwan's economy in its tracks. Mr. Chen's approval rating tumbled to 34 percent from 77 percent, according to a television station survey issued this week.

Meanwhile, despite portraying himself as Taiwan's equivalent of Richard M. Nixon ?an anti-Communist who could break the deadlock with China ?Mr. Chen, 50, has made no headway with Beijing. The Chinese government has met with senior Nationalist officials and business people ?any prominent Taiwanese, it seems, except the president.

Such tactics are neither new nor unexpected, but they deeply frustrate top officials in the Chen government. "When mainland China wants to negotiate, they should negotiate with those people in power and not people in the opposition or in business circles," Prime Minister Chang Chun-hsiung said in an interview.

"We really regret the attitude that mainland China has taken on this new government," Mr. Chang said. "They simply ignore our good will. They refuse to open a dialogue with us and keep contacting the opposition parties."

The opposition, said one of Mr. Chen's national security advisers, Antonio Chiang, "behaves like the ruling party."

Mr. Chiang said the president had been destined to have a turbulent first year, given his messy victory. He was elected with 39 percent of the vote, in a three-way race against a fractured Nationalist Party. The Nationalists kept 117 of the 225 seats in the legislature, leaving Mr. Chen's party a minority.

That could change after legislative elections set for December. But the vote, once viewed as a chance for the Democratic Progressive Party to seize a majority, now seems likely to perpetuate the status quo.

Analysts expect the Nationalists to lose several seats, while Mr. Chen's party picks up a few. But the biggest gains are likely to go to a new party formed by James Soong, a former Nationalist who ran for president as an independent last year and finished a close second to Mr. Chen.

Mr. Soong is expected to form an alliance with the Nationalists, which will leave the president's party in the minority for the two and a half years left in his term. The Nationalists already plan to demand that Mr. Chen appoint a prime minister from the opposition after the vote.

The party of Chiang Kai-shek has had a year to regroup since its humiliating defeat. Officials said the Nationalists had made the party more democratic and transparent, putting many of its commercial assets into trusts. The party's business empire was criticized as a sinkhole of corruption.

Serving as the loyal opposition, however, does not suit the Nationalists. They have been relentless in trying to hobble Mr. Chen.

"Despite our shortcomings, we achieved political stability and economic prosperity over 55 years," said Yu-ming Shaw, the chairman of the Nationalist Party's newspaper, the Central Daily News. "In just one year, we've had economic collapse, political instability, and a rigid stalemate across the strait."

In his book, Mr. Hu blames some of Mr. Chen's woes on his personality, which is perceived as alternately aggressive and timid.

On relations with Beijing, for example, Mr. Chen has tried to take a more ambiguous stance than that of his formally pro-independence party, extending olive branches to the mainland while not budging from a refusal to accept the "one China" principle before negotiations start.

Beijing, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province, has not relented from its demand that Taipei accept the principle of "one China."

Many experts believe the window for resuming talks will close by this summer, when Taiwan gears up for its elections and Chinese leaders jockey in advance of a Communist Party congress in 2002. With the diplomatic lines crossed, experts said Mr. Chen would probably focus his energy on the one issue that may have done most to get him elected: corruption within Taiwan.

Prime Minister Chang said the government had begun to cut back practices like vote buying, and noted that several officials caught in the anticorruption campaign to date were from Mr. Chen's party.

Mr. Chang, who has come under even heavier fire than his boss, takes the long view on Taiwan's tumultuous year. "For the past 50 years, Taiwan has undergone martial law and military control," the prime minister said. "Only through this type of political struggle have we liberalized and democratized the whole society."

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