“Please believe that this is for real,” President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) government said a few days ago, after the Cabinet passed an amendment to the Organic Act of the Executive Yuan (行政院組織法). The government wants the public to believe that its latest round of “government restructuring” will be real reform.
To this, one might like to say: “Perhaps you are ‘for real’ this time, but does this not imply that all the reforms you talked about in the past were fake?”
Real reformers need not worry about people not believing their reforms are in earnest. Real reformers are not only capable of putting aside vested interests, they also know how to transcend pre-existing concepts and put aside the burdens of tradition. Otherwise, reform may not be able to achieve all it is meant to do. The Ma administration’s latest round of “government restructuring” is a case in point.
