Li Zhen-xiu (李貞秀) is truly a pity.
Not because she lasted only seventy days as a legislator. Not because she picked a fight with the Taiwan People's Party and got herself kicked out. And certainly not because the "lawmaker" title she prized so highly earned her more airtime on green-leaning talk shows than on the legislative floor. Taiwan politics, taken with a grain of salt, is pure entertainment — the only question is how long her tirades against Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), Kao Hung-an (高虹安) and Chen Chih-han (陳智涵) can keep the audience amused.
The real pity is that Li never understood what her own behaviour was proving: the old saying "small temple, big demons." She has become a live-action textbook for everything that goes wrong in a minor party.
From party protector to party wrecker
Li flipped overnight from "the whole party protects one person" to "one person wages war on the whole party." What finally triggered the Taiwan People's Party was her livestream meltdown after Democratic Progressive Party officials repeatedly stonewalled her. She named Kao Hung-an, claiming the legislator had taken NT$7 million from Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), and boasted that she herself had collected other people's personal data to set up an association.
Human emotions run high under pressure — understandable. But this was a woman who had spent two years interning in Huang Kuo-chang's (黃國昌) office as a backup at-large candidate. Knowing what to say and what not to say should have been Lesson One.
Instead, four years after first reporting Kao Hung-an during a local election spat, she kept biting the same bone even after becoming a legislator. When the party expelled her, she simply moved the attack to talk shows — and when she couldn't reach Kao directly, she went after Kao's boyfriend: "shameless," she sneered, because the Yung Ling Foundation pays him NT$500,000 a month while he also draws legislative assistant pay. Kao Hung-an's corruption case had already been overturned on appeal late last year, reduced to a document-forgery charge that can be settled with a fine. Kao had done nothing to Li. Yet Li dragged her through the mud anyway, as if publicly destroying a fellow party member would somehow force the DPP government to "recognize" her seat.
If that was the plan, five words say it all: she had completely lost the plot.
"One country on each side" is the DPP's ultimate article of faith — harder than even its anti-nuclear creed. Li's eligibility rested on the "before national unification" premise of the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area. Her very presence as a legislator was a direct poke at that sacred tablet. She was the thorn the DPP could not legally yank out. Had she stayed calm, the green camp's ministers could have kept ignoring her — but they could never deny that her candidacy and succession had been certified by the Central Election Commission. Any challenge to her right to serve still had to play by the same constitutional rules the DPP hates. On that narrow battlefield, the DPP was not guaranteed victory.
Instead, Li chose to self-destruct.
Misreading the room — and the party
After more than thirty years in Taiwan, Li had watched enough legislative brawls to decide that the only way to win respect was to come out swinging. She refused to play the supplicant. That instinct was not entirely wrong. Taiwan does not treat mainland-born residents — Lupei spouses in particular — with the equality it loudly professes.
But there is a difference between being tough and being suicidal. Had she used her platform — whether in the legislature, at Taiwan People's Party press conferences, or in her own livestreams — to talk real policy or to pursue the kind of evidence-based exposés that made Huang Kuo-chang's name, she could have built genuine support the DPP would have found far harder to dismiss.
Instead she aimed her fire at her own side's old wounds. The one group in Taiwan least able to benefit from such attacks was precisely the mainland spouse trying to establish legislative legitimacy. She was, in effect, shooting her own foundation in the foot.
Her claim that Huang Kuo-chang opposed her because her audience was bigger than his — and that he fundamentally hates Lupei legislators — does not hold up. Identity was never the issue. Huang had supported putting her on the list precisely because Ko Wen-je had long championed Lupei political rights as part of his "two sides of the strait, one family" line. Competence was the issue. And Li's subsequent conduct made Huang's caution look wise.
Small temple, big demons — Li Zhen-xiu is the pit Ko Wen-je dug for his own party
Li's attacks on the DPP achieved nothing. Turning the guns inward was what finally made the entire Taiwan People's Party say "enough." Her performance is no longer just about whether one legislator keeps her seat. It is about whether a party already short on political capital can survive having so much of it burned in public.
Why did Li plant so many landmines in just two months? First, her grudge against Kao Hung-an from local-election days clearly never healed, even after she took office. Second, two years of interning taught her nothing about widening her horizons or refining her methods — she could only dredge up dirt on her own people. Third, she openly complained that Huang Kuo-chang brought her into committee meetings but never into his personal office, and blamed it on his supposed hatred of Lupei rather than on basic political judgment. She even declared on air that Huang was the only one capable of leading the party. An intern-turned-legislator lecturing the floor leader on party leadership? Huang should count himself lucky he kept her at arm's length.
Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), however, cannot dodge the bigger blame. From Hsu Chun-ying (徐春鶯) to Li Zhen-xiu, he has repeatedly placed high-risk figures in the public eye without proper vetting. This is not a string of accidents. It is a pattern that has left the Taiwan People's Party's grassroots forever divided and never truly united.
"Small temple, big demons" is real — and the man who opened the window is Ko Wen-je himself. Who else is there to blame?
Li Zhen-xiu did not need to be a legislative superstar. She only needed to last long enough to make the DPP's contradictions impossible to ignore. Instead, she turned a historic breakthrough for mainland spouses into a cautionary tale. Whether she meant to play the avenger or the terminator, the result is the same: the first Lupei legislator may also have become the last — at least for a very long time.
