Crowds gathered on Ketagalan Boulevard on Saturday to protest the tainted cooking oil scandal, and their anger was justified.
Food safety is a fundamental public responsibility. Every citizen has not only the right but the civic duty to demand answers from those entrusted with protecting public health.
Yet the rally revealed something more troubling than regulatory failure. It exposed a dangerous imbalance in Taiwan’s political priorities.
Taiwan sometimes behaves as though it lives on another planet: a planet where the wars and rivalries redefining the global order are someone else’s problem; a planet where China’s escalating military pressure around Taiwan and in the South China Sea is merely background noise; a planet where energy security, civil defense, drone production, and supply chain resilience are topics for casual discussion rather than urgent national priorities.
Food safety deserves serious and sustained attention. It must never, however, be allowed to consume so much of the nation’s finite political attention that existential threats fade into the background.
The contaminated oil scandal should never have devolved into another episode of partisan spectacle. The companies responsible must face rigorous investigation and serious punishment.
The central government must fully explain what went wrong, strengthen oversight, and restore public confidence through competent administration rather than political deflection.
Accountability, however, begins with the fundamentals of governance. Municipal and county governments are Taiwan’s first line of defense in food safety.
They license businesses, conduct inspections, and possess the local knowledge needed to detect problems before they grow into national crises.
Once contamination crosses jurisdictional boundaries, however, the central government must coordinate the response. Food safety should therefore be a model of cooperation between different levels of government, not another battlefield for partisan conflict.
Instead, the scandal was quickly absorbed into Taiwan’s perpetual campaign cycle.
Opposition parties are right to scrutinize those in power. Robust oversight is indispensable in any healthy democracy.
Responsible opposition, however, is measured not only by its willingness to criticize, but also by its ability to demonstrate how institutions should work together during moments of crisis.
When public health becomes another weapon in partisan warfare, genuine accountability gives way to political theater.
The deeper lesson from Saturday’s rally lies not in the legitimacy of the grievances expressed, but in what the episode reveals about Taiwan’s hierarchy of priorities.
While Beijing rapidly expands both the scale and sophistication of its military pressure, Taiwan continues to delay critical defense investments, underinvest in essential military capabilities, and allow domestic controversies to dominate headlines and social media.
Recent conflicts around the world have repeatedly demonstrated how quickly energy infrastructure, logistics networks, communications systems, and civilian supply chains become strategic targets in modern warfare.
These realities will shape Taiwan’s future far more profoundly than any single episode of regulatory failure. Yet they rarely generate the same public urgency.
Taiwan has repeatedly filled its streets to protest domestic scandals. Where are the sustained demonstrations demanding stronger civil defense, accelerated drone production, larger strategic fuel reserves, or faster military procurement?
Legislative battles over national defense seldom inspire the same intensity as the outrage of the moment.
Democracies naturally reward immediate grievances over distant dangers. A contaminated product is visible; deterrence is invisible.
Political leaders therefore respond to what captures public attention. That should surprise no one, but it should alarm everyone.
History repeatedly shows that nations are punished not for overlooking yesterday’s scandal, but for underestimating tomorrow’s crisis. Taiwan’s challenge, however, is even more urgent: the dangers it faces are anything but distant.
This is not an argument that food safety is unimportant. It is an argument about proportion.
Healthy democracies must distinguish between serious failures of governance and threats that endanger the survival of the democratic system itself.
Democracies rarely fail because citizens care about the wrong issues. They fail because they become consumed by the urgent while neglecting the existential.
Taiwan cannot afford such a misallocation of attention or political will.
Its democracy is strongest when local and central governments work together to solve the practical problems of everyday life while maintaining an unwavering focus on the strategic challenges that will ultimately determine whether that democracy survives.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong who lives in Taiwan and is the author of “Taiwan Is Taiwan.”
