Aaron Yin of WeCare Kaohsiung Forges Ahead to Recall Mayor Han Kuo-yu

Aaron Yin 尹立 is the initiator of WeCare Kaohsiung, one of the civic organizations jointly running a campaign to hold a recall vote against Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu 韓國瑜.

In 2016, Yin, who has a background in design, was appointed as the Director-General of the Kaohsiung Cultural Bureau. In the later stages of Han’s mayoral election campaign, which was heavily reliant on promoting an image of Kaohsiung as a decrepit city, Yin stepped down from his city government position and launched the WeCare campaign to combat Han’s strategy.

On June 27, following Han’s nomination to serve as the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) presidential candidate, Yin officially launched a campaign to recall Han from the mayor’s office.

According to Taiwan’s Civil Servants Election and Recall Act, recalls must pass two stages before a vote is approved. Currently, signatures are being collected to pass the second threshold, which requires 228,134 (10%) of eligible Kaohsiung residents to petition for a recall vote within a 60-day period. The second stage started on January 28, with the civic groups aiming to collect 300,000 signatures.

WeCare says that, by January 10, it had collected 214,378 petitions.

As the likelihood of a recall vote being approved looms large over Kaohsiung, Ketagalan Media headed down to Kaohsiung to meet Yin at the WeCare headquarters to discuss the campaign, the recent threats he has received, and the mayoral shenanigans that have led the city to strike back against Han Kuo-yu.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

KM: Can you describe your background for readers?

Aaron Yin: I’m the second generation of a family that came to Taiwan from China in 1949 and I grew up in a military dependent’s village in Tainan, so my family supported the KMT. I’m a design professor, and in 2006 I cooperated with Kaohsiung City government on the Pier-2 Art and Exhibition Area. Later in 2008 I was involved with the Kaohsiung Design Festival held at the Dream Mall and this was the start of my long-term collaboration with the Bureau of Cultural Affairs through the Designers Association of Taiwan from 2009-2013 [Yin was president of the association from 2005-2013].

In 2016, I was invited by the then-mayor Chen Chu 陳菊 to take the position of the Director-General in the Bureau of Cultural Affairs.

KM: You resigned from that position on November 7, 2018, three weeks before the mayoral election. Why did you decide to do that?

AY: Historically, Kaohsiung has been a city built around industry, and in the past, it was a desert in terms of art and culture. Chen Chu started implementing arts and cultural affairs to promote the aesthetics of the city, with projects such as the National Arts Center and the Kaohsiung Music Arts Center. But during Han’s mayoral campaign, he criticized these efforts, describing Kaohsiung as very poor and very old, saying these developments and constructions are actually useless because Kaohsiung’s citizens are as poor as beggars, that we can’t afford the tickets for the arts performance so what use do we have for these kinds of developments? Han used this criticism and propaganda to criticize Chen Chu’s government, and these were the projects I was directly responsible for.

KM: Were the tickets too expensive?

AY: I think the key point was not the price of the tickets because I think that this is about the establishment and development of Kaohsiung city branding. Actually, the budget for these kind of cultural affairs and events was very little in terms of the overall budget. [At both central and local government level cultural department budgets are around 1% of the whole, and include libraries, orchestras and so on]. We did a lot of work to put this budget to good use, but it was still attacked as worthless by Han, who said it didn’t improve the city and [it] damaged the economy while citizens didn’t make any money.

KM: Why didn’t you wait to see the results of the election before you resigned?

AY: Because of the criticisms, which I don’t think were appropriate in a mayoral campaign. I am not from the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), nor am I a member, but because of my efforts in helping Kaohsiung improve, I could not choose Han as my mayor. So I chose to resign to provide another voice and perspective to Kaohsiung citizens to remind them of the value of the city and what we have done. If I stayed on as director-general, there were many things I couldn’t say, as it would be a conflict with my position as a public servant.

KM: Both before and after you resigned, you published critiques about Han’s mayoral campaign on your Facebook page. Can you explain your reasons for that?

AY: The content was that I despised Han’s campaign attitude in terms of artistic aesthetics and intellectual property. They were using a logo which was very similar to a logo from a company in the USA. During the campaign, he misused a lot of other people’s intellectual property to criticize what Kaohsiung city had been doing [without permission]. For example, he used a Thai film, but changed the subtitles of the film and dubbed it to criticize Chen Chu’s government.

Since Han has taken office, the policies in cultural affairs are very old school and very ugly actually, with no cultural context.

A family signs a petition to recall Han Kuo-yu at the headquarters of WeCare Kaohsiung. (Photo: Cat Thomas)

KM: What happened with projects that you had in the pipeline that were not completed before you quit?

AY: The major policies, not only the cultural policies, have been stopped by Mayor Han since he took office. Only small things like garbage cleaning or road maintenance are carried out, but major policies or development plans have all been stopped.

In terms of cultural policies: for example, the Megaport Festival was actually a very big music festival in Kaohsiung, but it was stopped. Some of the festivals, like the Spring Arts Festival, were continued, but it is actually very hard to hold such an event with a small budget, so [when I was in office] I would seek sponsorship from the private sector for this kind of festival.

Currently the Bureau of Cultural Affairs is turning back to the old way of doing things. If they have a NT$10 million budget, they put on the event with only that, but I would find another NT$10 million [through sponsorships] to hold such big events.

KM: Do you think your experience working in the city government gives you a different insight into Han as mayor? How much influence/power does a mayor hold in Taiwan?

AY: As a mayor in Kaohsiung city Han has about NT$140 billion to spend per year and 30,000 to 40,000 employees working for him. But in Taiwan, the central government holds a lot of budget for development policies and construction for use by local governments. So a mayor needs to propose a reasonable and appropriate budget to ask for these funds.

But Mayor Han has done nothing but propaganda or bluffing. A lot of his policies and proposals before taking office were about building things like a Ferris wheel in the city or even drilling for oil on Taiping Island [a disputed territory in the South China Sea]. Actually, these are not carefully thought about or planned.

Last year, with the dengue fever outbreak, he did nothing, but [he] accused the central government of not giving him enough money to prevent the outbreak. Actually, this was because he did not propose a reasonable or organized plan to request the budget.

Recently, [in response to] the coronavirus [outbreak], he only smelt the disinfectant liquid, claiming that he could tell the composition of it, and proposed building a new hospital in the military barracks for patients. But these are only words, and they are not well organized before he speaks.

KM: In an interview in Here Now Kaohsiung in December 2017, you talked about Kaohsiung people being open-minded and open to experimenting with new concepts and cultures. Do you think this willingness to try new things is why Han got elected in 2018?

AY: Because Kaohsiung is a harbor city, we have ocean characteristics in our blood. We are very open, and very passionate about trying new things. So if you have a very well organized or good plan, then we will give you a chance. Our previous mayors, Chen Chu and Wu Den-yih 吳敦義, were not from Kaohsiung, so you can see Kaohsiung citizens are open to giving people from outside the city a chance.

Even though Han was a politician from Taipei, he came to Kaohsiung and proposed a very good plan, and Kaohsiung citizens trusted him and placed their belief in him. But in the end, he lied to the city and the citizens, for example by going to run in the presidential election and doing nothing in his office of mayor. If you have a good plan we can give you a chance, but don’t lie to us.

KM: When did you personally start thinking about the possibility of a recall?

AY: When Han came back from [the United States] last May and announced that he would run for the presidential nomination. After his election as mayor, I publicly called for him to peacefully and continuously work toward making Kaohsiung a better city, more cultured and beautiful. But after only a few months of being mayor, he was aiming to become president.

And then everything he did in his presidential campaign was the same as his mayoral campaign—the generational split, the racial split and encouraging opposition between different groups and ideas. But he just enlarged the scale to encompass the whole of Taiwan. So I decided to combat the situation by starting the recall process.

KM: Laws in Taiwan were amended in November 2016 to lower the threshold for a recall, but is it possible that the people are starting to demand that representatives should be more accountable as their democracy matures, which may be why we are seeing more attempts at recall in Taiwan?

AY: If we look at the recall history in Taiwan, we can see only a few people have been subject to a proposal to recall. But the only person [who has faced two recall drives] is Han Kuo-yu.

In 1994, when he was a Taipei County [now New Taipei City] legislator, an environmental group proposed a recall after a controversy over the [proposed] fourth nuclear plant. [Editor’s note: The recall, which called for the removal of Han and three other legislators, went to the voting stage but did not meet the then-50% threshold for participation.] In general, Taiwanese are more familiar with [the] regular election process we experience every two years, and recalls are quite rare. But as Mayor Han is doing such a bad job, we’re beginning to understand that we have this option for recall and to look at the process.

Another issue is that the Kaohsiung Electoral Commission is controlled by Han. The election commission decides if the collected signatures are valid or not and if the threshold is met. When Chen Chu was mayor, for example, only civil servants were involved; there were no administration figures responsible for this, so it was neutral and fair. But Han has refused to remove his administration officers from the department. The deputy mayor, who was nominated by Han, is the chairman of the Kaohsiung election commission.

KM: You’ve had cause to complain publicly about Kaohsiung election commission. Can you outline the reasons why?

AY: The first reason is that public servants are trained to obey their superiors. When the deputy mayor is head of the election commission, Han Kuo-yu is effectively directly controlling these public servants.

Second, the commission has the power to decide if signatures are valid—for example, depending on if people use an incorrect or simplified character when handwriting their details—and Han is control of this.

Third, since the head of the commission is an administration officer, he, too, will lose his job if the recall vote is successful. So he’s also a target of the recall, which is a conflict of interest. This situation isn’t expressly forbidden by law, but this goes back to the idea of public conscientiousness.

In the first day of gathering signatures, we realized we were unclear about many details, such as if typing the details of signatories was acceptable or not, so we sent a letter seeking guidance. It took a week to get a reply, even though we are limited to 60 days to collect signatures. However, they were quick to send us a letter suggesting there may be fraudulent signatures and to later issue a public statement claiming that there may be forged signatures, without presenting any evidence.

Detailed instructions to ensure signatures comply with election commission rules. (Photo: Cat Thomas)

KM: What have been the biggest challenges and highlights of the campaign so far?

AY: This is the first time that a position as high as mayor has been threatened with a recall. So the main idea is to warn elected officials: Just as you can be elected, you can be recalled.

The biggest challenge for me has been the anti-democratic thinking and unreasonable attacks online and in real life, and concerns about the fairness of the election commission. I feel very honored to participate in such a historic event, which honors our rights under the constitution and raises questions about our current system, such as only being able to participate via paper rather than online. Maybe next time, we can find a way to use ICT technology to do this.

KM: You’ve had signatures from Kaohsiung registered voters living overseas, do you have an idea of how many?

AY: Actually, we’ve had many from the U.S., Canada and Japan. It’s very touching to receive these by mail. One from the U.S. cost the sender around NT$2,000 to post, and it shows this person really cares about Kaohsiung to make such a financial sacrifice. Also many who came back over Lunar New Year took the time to come in person and sign too.

KM: Of the people coming to stations to sign in person what is your impression in terms of demographics?

AY: There are a lot of young people, but we see people from every corner of Kaohsiung coming here to the headquarters to sign. The people come from all classes and ages, parents with young kids, even some elders. Of course, Han’s support is mainly concentrated among the elderly, so we expect the younger people will be in the majority.

KM: Realistically, how strong do you think Han’s support in Kaohsiung is right now?

AY: The base level of KMT support is always 30-40% as the KMT is one of the biggest parties in Taiwan. In the recent presidential election figures for Kaohsiung showed a 480,000 difference in those voting for President Tsai Ing-wen 蔡英文 over Han, which is a historical high. Han won by 150,000 in the mayoral election [over DPP challenger Chen Chi-mai 陳其邁]. Kaohsiung had seven of the 10 highest turnout districts this presidential election, and we have around 3 million voters here.

Within two weeks, we reached over 200,000 signatures, despite the news cycle being dominated by the coronavirus. A poll run by ET Today showed that 64% support the recall motion. We think that the polls are pretty clear. Even KMT-friendly media are showing figures of over 50% in favor of recall.

KM: What would you say to people still on the fence, who dislike Han but think that he should be given a chance since he was elected, or fervent Han supporters?

AY: This is a democracy, it’s okay to support Han. But your mayor is just a public servant, he’s not your father. So if he is performing badly and we change mayors, it is not so serious. Just make your voice heard by voting in the recall.

KM: On January 30, you published a death threat letter you had received. Is this the first one you’ve had?

AY: It’s not the only one, but that one was quite funny so I decided to publish it. But I’ve had hundreds online and by post.

The first time I received one, I felt a little dispirited, but I’ve got over that feeling. To the people sending them, I would like to say you should be more civic minded and respect the democratic process. If you don’t like what I’m doing, come to vote and use your vote to express your opinion instead of attacking people online and in real life. You should hope your democracy can function well rather than idolize a populist leader.

KM: There have been reports of Han supporters getting very angry with volunteers collecting signatures. What advice have you given your volunteers about how to handle such situations?

AY: I advised them to do our thing, and our thing only. Don’t provoke them or rise to the bait. But some of these Han supporters are not only shouting or cursing at the signing station, they even drive really fast past the station to try to disrupt our actions. To both our volunteers and these Han supporters, I say we must be reasonable.

People sign recall petitions at WeCare Kaohsiung headquarters. (Photo: Cat Thomas)

KM: In December 2019, United Daily News ran a story in which the Han presidential campaign suggested impropriety in you winning 19 tenders from Kaohsiung city government between 2008 and 2017. Can you comment on that?

AY: These tenders were from the Association of Designers in Kaohsiung, which I ceased being president of in 2013, so they are not my tenders. But Han’s team suggested that these are all my work. I’d like to make clear that these tenders were mainly focused on the joint public and private funded ‘Youth Innovative Design Festival’ at the Pier-2 Arts Center. [The total budget was around NT$700,000, including exhibition curating, campaign planning, inviting judges, paying judges, and all the other expenses and salaries. However, the budget did not cover the prizes for the campaign so I would acquire sponsorship from local enterprises through my personal effort and network] so the money did not come back into the association.

KM: How is the recall campaign being funded?

AY: The recall campaign is supported through fundraising by selling campaign products and by the efforts of volunteers. We have no public or private resources as a civic organization.

KM: Some people have criticized the cost of a recall for the city, which is estimated to be NT$2 million including a by-election. How do you respond to such criticisms?

AY: If Han had won the presidential election, we would have had to pay for a by-election anyway. You can’t only complain about by-election costs now that he’s lost. Also, this is our right under the constitution, so the administration and the government should honor that.

KM: If you pass the threshold, will you submit the petitions early?

AY: That’s a possibility, but there’s still a lot to do to arrange filling and so on, but the intention is to submit early.

KM: Finally, we’ve heard a lot of reasons you don’t think Han is suitable for the role of mayor. But is there anything you think Han is doing right?

AY: [lengthy pause] Nothing comes to mind.

At press time, WeCare claimed to have collected 295,475 petitions and hope to meet their target of 300,000 by February 16. According to Article 83 of the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act, the election commission must assess the validity of the recall petitions within 40 days of submission. If the number of valid petitions is not met, 10 further days may be granted to obtain further petitions. If the recall is established, the subject is granted a 10-day period to present a statement of defense. Within five days after that period, the election commission must set a date for the recall vote. In order to be valid, at least 25% of the electorate must vote (which is around 570,000 in Kaohsiung) and a simple majority must be achieved for it to either pass or fail.

(Cover photo supplied by Aaron Yin)