Chapter 1: The Price of Market Eggs and the DPP’s Hidden Bill
There has never been an economic miracle when it comes to commodity prices; every “bargain” offered by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is sustained entirely by recklessly cannibalizing national reserves.
When you walk into a traditional market to buy vegetables or a carton of eggs, glancing at the soaring price tags, you curse under your breath that everything is becoming more expensive. But what most people fail to see is this: if the DPP had not pinned two colossal state enterprises to the ground and bled them dry, the thousand-dollar bills in your pocket would have long depreciated into thin paper.
These two emaciated bodies, drained to the bone, are Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) and CPC Corporation, Taiwan (CPC).
In recent years, the DPP has excelled at performing in front of cameras, adopting a saintly posture of empathizing with common folk and fighting tooth and nail to stabilize prices. As international prices of coal, natural gas, and crude oil skyrocketed, DPP officials lined up at press conferences, swearing solemnly to freeze electricity tariffs and suppress gasoline prices. Citizens applauded, believing the DPP possessed divine powers capable of keeping Taiwan immune from the global tsunami of inflation.
It was nothing more than a political con game treating the entire populace as fools. The cost of imported fuel was real and undeniable; not a single penny would vanish into thin air. The DPP simply concealed it by force.
The DPP’s tactic was exceedingly crude: if they didn’t dare make voters feel the pain, they forced state-owned enterprises to swallow the loss themselves.
While the cost of generating one kilowatt-hour of electricity soared to four or five NT dollars, Taipower was coerced into dumping it at just over two dollars. While the cost of importing crude oil and refining it into gasoline kept mounting, CPC was forced to absorb losses in tears. What the DPP wanted was flattering polling figures, retained votes, and perpetuated power; as for the balance sheets of Taipower and CPC? In the DPP’s eyes, those were merely sheets of scrap paper that could be fed into a shredder at any moment.
This is by no means wise macroeconomic governance; it is the DPP’s most despicable evasion of political accountability. The DPP created an untenable “nuclear-free” energy policy that spiraled generation costs completely out of control. Yet, unwilling to face the consequences honestly or bear the political fallout of market-reflective prices, the regime recklessly raided the nation’s vaults, using these two state giants as human shields to take bullets for its own incompetence.
Ordinary people think they saved a few hundred dollars on electricity bills, but in truth, the DPP is bleeding the lifeblood of the entire nation dry, drop by drop.
Chapter 2: “Brothers in Misfortune” Reduced to the DPP’s Exclusive ATM
In the history of economic development in the Republic of China, Taipower and CPC have never been treated with such indignity and humiliation as under DPP governance. These “brothers in misfortune” not only had to take the blame for the DPP’s disastrous energy policies, but even worse, they have degenerated into disposable ATMs for DPP factions from central to local levels.
The public assumes their plight is limited to hundreds of billions in fuel cost deficits on paper. That vastly underestimates the insatiable appetite of the DPP’s parasitic mechanism.
In the shadowy corners away from public view lies endless political extortion. Whenever DPP factions, local mayors, or legislators need funds to organize events, promote vanity projects, or court their constituencies, official request memos are immediately dispatched to Taipower and CPC.
When DPP-governed cities want to hold music festivals or launch fireworks displays for grand propaganda, they demand sponsorships from Taipower. When local DPP elected representatives seek to package achievements, repair hiking trails, or hold neighborhood banquets, they demand local goodwill feedback funds from CPC. The pretexts are endless, with each requisition easily demanding millions or tens of millions. Do state enterprises dare refuse? With top executives’ appointments held hostage in DPP hands, who dares utter a single “no”?
Consequently, funds that should have been spent on replacing obsolete power lines, upgrading substations, maintaining oil storage tanks, and investing in core technological R&D have been sliced into scraps of meat and thrown around to feed factional loyalists and mobilize political patronage networks. While Taipower suffers chronic deficits on the verge of bankruptcy and frequent unannounced power outages due to aging equipment—leaving frontline repair workers to bear the brunt of public fury—DPP politicians sitting in air-conditioned offices continue wielding the budget axe, unapologetically coercing these cash-strapped entities to fork over tribute.
This is not corporate governance; it is legalized plunder conducted in the name of governance.
Chapter 3: CPC’s Silent Abyss and the DPP’s Geothermal White Elephant
While Taipower’s deficits make daily headlines, CPC’s plight has been tightly sealed in a black box by the DPP.
While public debate focuses on Taipower’s multi-hundred-billion losses and its fragile electrical grid, CPC—that hardworking workhorse—has long suffered internal injuries down to the bone, without even the breath to cry out in pain. Saddled with the DPP’s price-freeze mandates, CPC has bled profusely on oil and gas prices; moreover, under political assignments dictated by the DPP’s “green energy myth,” it has become an unwitting scapegoat.
The most ironic farce is the DPP’s aggressive push for geothermal power generation.
To assemble the unfulfillable promissory note of a “nuclear-free homeland” through renewable energy, the DPP turned its opportunistic eyes toward CPC. DPP officials tapped their foreheads, concluding that because CPC possessed petroleum and natural gas drilling technology, it could seamlessly drill for geothermal energy. Slogans were trumpeted loudly and press conferences held one after another, as if the moment CPC’s drilling rigs penetrated the ground, scalding steam would endlessly convert into a boundless stream of clean green electricity.
And the outcome? Hundreds of millions, even billions of taxpayer dollars were dumped straight into the ground.
Geothermal development is far from merely “digging a hole down into the earth.” Extreme acidity and corrosion deep underground, severe degradation of pipelines under high temperatures and pressures, turbulent tectonic shifts, and extensive mineral scaling carried in geothermal steam—every single one is a brutal engineering challenge. Under the DPP’s politically-driven, short-sighted rush, professional evaluations were discarded into the trash bin, and technical feasibility surrendered entirely to political propaganda.
After spending hundreds of millions of public funds on drilling, what emerged was not endless electricity generation, but a string of abandoned wells that could not even meet commercial operation thresholds.
The rate of thermal depletion was startlingly rapid, generation efficiency was dismal, and worse, equipment corroded and deteriorated in no time. This was no energy breakthrough; it was an absolute disaster. While the DPP loves buying sensational headlines and infographics over trivial minor achievements, it has maintained collective silence over CPC’s astronomically expensive geothermal fiasco. Because the results were so catastrophic that even PR agencies could not spin or fake success, expensive drilling equipment was left to rust in the wilderness, literally burning through hundreds of millions of public dollars like ghost money.
CPC’s professional technical personnel could only shake their heads in dismay on the frontlines. But for the government-appointed chairmen and executives installed by the DPP, who cared whether the technology was commercially viable? As long as they played the role of “cooperating with green energy policy” convincingly in front of DPP authorities, their official posts remained secure. This catastrophic tab was quietly folded into CPC’s ballooning deficits, left for the entire public to pay.
Chapter 4: Professionals Cast Aside: The DPP’s Spoils System and Patronage Ecology
Why did venerable state-owned giants decay to their core within a few short years?
The answer is simple: the DPP thoroughly demolished the professional technocratic civil service inside state enterprises, turning them into a playground for factional patronage and spoils.
In the past, state-owned enterprises were anchored by a rigorous technocratic system. Engineers with technical expertise rose step by step through the ranks, making decisions based on precise cost-benefit analyses, rigorous geological and hydrological data, and the long-term lifespan of infrastructure. Under DPP rule, however, this entire framework was discarded.
In its place came political patronage based strictly on party allegiance, factional ties, and personal loyalty.
From chairmen and general managers down to crucial managerial posts, the DPP stuffed positions with defeated politicians, partisan cronies devoid of industry experience, and sycophantic political operatives. For these parachute appointees, what did the long-term financial health of Taipower and CPC matter to them? What did it matter if facilities suffered massive blackouts ten years down the road?
Their mission consisted of only two things: first, spare no expense to coordinate political theater whenever the DPP regime needed PR stunts; second, swiftly approve funding whenever DPP figures demanded event sponsorships or policy subsidies.
Under this distorted ecosystem where bad money drives out good, competent technocrats who understood technology and spoke truth were utterly marginalized. Anyone daring to point out in meetings that “geothermal plans are infeasible” or “an excessively high proportion of natural gas poses acute supply cutoff risks” was immediately slapped with political labels like “opposing green energy transition” or “parroting the opposition’s smear campaigns,” and banished to the cold bench.
Thus, executive leadership filled up with yes-men who only anticipated superiors’ whims and whitewashed reality. Knowing full well how absurd policies were, they tacitly engaged in statistical trickery: when power generation fell short, redefine definitions; when reserve margins hit emergency lows, secretly throttle voltage; when balance sheet deficits grew catastrophic, order the Ministry of Finance to inject capital.
This is not stewarding the nation’s most critical lifeline enterprises; this is using gangster spoils logic to dismantle the technological foundation accumulated over decades in Taiwan.
Chapter 5: Social Costs: The Domino Effect of Robbing Peter to Pay Paul
There is no free lunch in this world; the “cheap utility rates” fed to the people of Taiwan by the DPP are essentially a sugar-coated slow poison.
Taipower’s paid-in capital has long been wiped out, and CPC’s debt ratio is approaching dangerous red lines. Under normal corporate law and market mechanisms, both corporate behemoths would have filed for bankruptcy and restructuring long ago. Yet under DPP manipulation, they invented a self-deluding alchemy: recapitalize, subsidize, and issue more bonds.
Wielding its legislative majority brute-force, the DPP passed special budgets worth hundreds of billions, transferring state treasury funds directly to Taipower with the stroke of a pen. Next, the Executive Yuan approved massive capital increases for Taipower, pouring the hard-earned tax dollars of all citizens directly into this bottomless abyss. The DPP propaganda machine brazenly boasted that this represented “the government taking responsibility and caring for people’s livelihoods.”
This is nothing but a cynical con game playing tricks on the populace.
Instead of raising your current monthly electricity bill, they siphon hundreds of billions from your income tax and business tax to plug the hole. When tax revenues fall short, state enterprises are ordered to issue hundreds of billions in corporate bonds, shifting the debt burden onto future generations. You think you saved a few hundred dollars every month on utilities? In reality, the moment your children and grandchildren are born, they inherit an enormous hidden national debt run up by the DPP to whitewash its energy policy.
An even more terrifying consequence is the comprehensive crowding out of public infrastructure investments.
The treasury’s coffers are finite. When hundreds of billions in tax revenues are locked into plugging the bottomless pit of oil and electricity deficits, public funds originally intended for renovating dilapidated school buildings, upgrading long-term elder care and healthcare, improving flood prevention and drainage, and building public transportation in underserved areas are ruthlessly squeezed out. Taiwan’s social safety net is fraying, basic infrastructure is decaying, and public services for younger generations are shrinking—all sacrificed at the altar of the DPP’s absurd energy fairy tale.
Through a shell game of robbing Peter to pay Paul, the DPP has manufactured an ephemeral illusion of price stability while plunging the entire society’s resilience against risks to rock bottom.
Chapter 6: Present Reflection: How Long Can a Riddled Foundation Hold?
Walking along the streets of Taiwan, the surface appears brightly lit and bustling as ever. Yet once the veil is lifted, the foundation underneath is riddled with holes and rotten to the core.
This is the unvarnished reality left behind after years of DPP rule: a hollow house of cards precariously propped up by lies, subsidies, and the blood-sucking of state-owned enterprises.
Taipower barely survives between rolling blackouts and voltage throttling, with frontline workers run ragged, praying daily that the fragile power grid won’t collapse under the scorching summer heat. CPC, while absorbing colossal policy-driven losses, is forced by the ruling party to dump hundreds of millions into non-viable geothermal dud wells, unable even to fake promotional achievements and forced to swallow the bitter pill in silence.
Two fundamental state lifelines have become the most tragic victims of the DPP’s incompetent governance. They must serve simultaneously as fig leaves suppressing inflation, ATMs for green-camp politicians and factions, and beast-of-burden workhorses in the reckless “nuclear-free homeland” myth.
Yet the reserve will eventually run out, and the safe inside the ATM will inevitably be emptied.
When equipment reaches the breaking point of aging and blackouts become a routine daily occurrence; when international commodity prices fluctuate again and subsidy mechanisms fracture completely; when the next generation is forced to confront hundreds of billions in toxic debt and a ruined energy infrastructure, DPP politicians will have long brushed off their clothes and stepped down—or transitioned into lucrative green-energy conglomerates to enjoy wealth and privilege.
Who suffers the most? It is the ordinary citizens who work tirelessly every single day, striving for every honest penny to make a living.
This is far more than a mere policy blunder. It is systematic incompetence and dereliction of duty, where the DPP sacrificed the nation’s foundations and sold out the future of generations solely to cling to political power. Confronting this precarious structure whose foundation has been completely hollowed out, if the people of Taiwan continue to believe the DPP’s honeyed slogans and whitewashed fabrications, what awaits the nation will not be a radiant and progressive future, but an irreversible and total collapse.
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