Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

As the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) prepares for its chairperson election, there have been reports of large numbers of “nominal” members — people recruited to the party just to vote for a particular candidate. Some reports have said that gang members are suspected to have recently been joining the KMT, including a man accused of beating a police officer to death outside a nightclub in 2014.

Modern democracies are usually divided into a tripartite framework with an executive, a legislative and a judicial branch, dividing responsibilities between accountable government, legislative oversight and judicial authority, all in the hope of achieving good governance.

When US Federal Judge James Robart recently blocked US President Donald Trump’s executive order banning citizens of seven Muslim countries from entering the US, it was an example of how the judicial branch supervises the government and stops it from abusing its powers.