"Chen ascribes much of the KMT’s unpopularity and recent electoral defeat to slow economic growth and unequal wealth distribution. Those are unquestionably serious issues and a real source of grievance with the public."
I disagree with this. To call something "unquestionable" when it is an opinion rather than a fact is to beg the very question thus dismissed. It is your opinion that "unequal wealth distribution" is a serious issue, but it is not a fact. I don't doubt for one moment that some majority of people will agree with your contention, but that alone does not make them correct (nor convert your opinion to a fact). The complaint against unequal wealth distribution matters because it is either one of two things (or a combination thereof): pure envy or the conflation of inequality of wealth with material poverty. Yet they are not the same thing and to conflate them is to commit the zero-sum fallacy. What gets people out of poverty is the day-to-day work of creating wealth, not "make-it-so" star trek people in government presuming to "redistribute" (i.e. steal) it.
The Taiwanese people who have been dispossessed by interest groups using the levers of political power (e.g. the Land Theft Act) to their advantage need their freedom, and in particular, their right to private property protected. If the Taiwanese are to have a future as an independent nation, then they must first demand their independence as individuals, and that requires a defense of rights, not as privileges bestowed by a newly "empathic" ruling class, but as protections from political power and the necessary premises for their sovereignty over themselves as individual human beings.
Complaints about "unequal wealth distribution" directly undermine any such effort, and indirectly insult the pride and intelligence of people who might otherwise be willing and able to try to better their circumstances without being treated like infants by their ruling Empaths.
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