When Taiwan's Legislative Yuan rejected Hsu Hsi-hsiang (徐錫祥) as the nominee for Prosecutor General, President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) did not pause, reconsider, or seek a new candidate. He immediately appointed Hsu as acting Prosecutor General — a move without precedent in Taiwan's post-reform history. Hsu, a trained legal professional who should know better, accepted without apparent reservation. Outside a small circle of critics, the legal community fell conspicuously silent. That silence is itself the problem — and one of the most telling signs of how deeply public trust in Taiwan's judiciary has eroded.
Hsu Hsi-hsiang's Appointment: The Second Collapse of Judicial Trust
Prosecutors are the state's frontline representatives in criminal justice and the public face of judicial credibility. Whether a prosecutor qualifies as a fully independent judicial officer has long been contested within Taiwan's legal community, and for good reason. Unlike judges, who are constitutionally insulated from external direction, prosecutors operate under a hierarchical command structure that the law explicitly preserves.
This structural subordination has deep roots. The ministry that once oversaw prosecutors nationwide was originally named the Ministry of Judicial Administration — and when it was renamed the Ministry of Justice, the hierarchical command relationship between superiors and subordinate prosecutors remained unchanged.
Under the Court Organization Act — Taiwan's foundational statute governing the judiciary — the Prosecutor General holds authority to direct and supervise prosecutors at the Supreme Prosecutors Office and all subordinate offices, including the power to assume, transfer, or redirect individual cases. No equivalent power exists for the President of the Judicial Yuan over judges. The asymmetry is deliberate, but it creates a structural vulnerability: whoever controls the Prosecutor General controls the prosecutorial machinery of the state.
Political actors have always tried to exploit that vulnerability. In 2006, during the first Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration, the Court Organization Act was amended with precisely the opposite intention — to insulate the office from executive manipulation. The change moved appointment authority away from the Ministry of Justice and the Executive Yuan, placing it instead with the president subject to Legislative Yuan confirmation. The reformers hoped that legislative oversight would act as a check. Instead, it created a new problem: the Prosecutor General became a prize in partisan competition, and in some cases, a weapon aimed at political opponents.
From Legislative Pressure to Presidential Temptation: A Pattern Across Administrations
The new procedure stumbled almost immediately. Former President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) first nominee, Hsieh Wen-ting (謝文定), was rejected by the legislature. Within three months, Chen nominated Prosecutor General Chen Chung-ming (陳聰明), secured support from the People First Party, and pushed the appointment through. Critics noted at the time that the reform had simply replaced one form of political interference — executive pressure — with another: legislative arm-twisting. But neither proved to be the most dangerous force in play. That turned out to be something simpler and harder to regulate: the temptation of supreme power.
Chen Chung-ming, despite surviving confirmation, ultimately resigned under impeachment pressure from the Control Yuan. He had maintained close ties with Huang Fang-yen (黃芳彥), a confidant of the Chen family, and failed to prevent Huang from fleeing Taiwan as corruption investigations widened. His resignation preserved a minimal degree of professional dignity; the civil service disciplinary body issued only a formal reprimand.
Former President Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) nominee Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) presented a more damaging case. Twice impeached by the Control Yuan — though neither impeachment was upheld — Huang was convicted by the Taipei District Court and sentenced to fourteen months in prison. The offense: during a political conflict between Ma and then-Legislative Yuan President Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), Huang made a late-night visit to the presidential residence to brief Ma on ongoing investigations, and had conducted surveillance on Wang and legislator Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) in connection with an unrelated case. The episode crystallized exactly what reformers had feared: a Prosecutor General acting as an instrument of presidential political strategy rather than as an independent officer of the law.
Ma's second nominee, Yen Da-ho (顏大和), and President Tsai Ing-wen's (蔡英文) first nominee, Jiang Hui-min (江惠民), completed their terms without major incident. Tsai's second nominee, Hsing Tai-chao (邢泰釗), was the top vote-getter in the Taiwan Prosecutors Association's internal reference poll — a body that has traditionally surveyed its membership before presidential nominations to signal professional consensus. Yet Hsing's tenure was the most openly contested in the office's modern history. Under his watch, critics documented a systematic pattern: aggressive prosecution of cases involving opposition Kuomintang (KMT) figures, near-complete inaction on cases involving DPP-linked individuals, routine leaking of investigation details to media, and an unusually close relationship between the prosecutors' office and certain television outlets. When Hsing left office and declared he had "no regrets," the statement was received with derision. Fairly or not, it reinforced the public perception that the office had become an extension of ruling-party political priorities — and it made the controversy surrounding his successor's nomination considerably worse.
Is Taiwan's Prosecutors Office Now a DPP Institution?
Three converging failures explain how Taiwan arrived at the current crisis.
First, Hsing Tai-chao's tenure led President Lai to conclude — or at minimum behave as though he believed — that the Prosecutor General could and should take direction from the presidential office. The logic closely mirrors how former Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) reportedly selected nominees to the National Communications Commission (NCC): the operative criterion was reliability, not independence.
Second, the Taiwan Prosecutors Association did not conduct its usual reference poll ahead of this nomination cycle. The poll has historically served as a professional check, signaling which candidates enjoy genuine credibility within the prosecutorial community. Its absence this time was not an oversight. Rival voices within the system began questioning whether the poll served any purpose at all — a sign that after ten years of DPP governance, the political fractures running through Taiwanese society have penetrated the prosecutorial and judicial bureaucracy itself. That fracture should not exist within an institution whose legitimacy depends on perceived impartiality.
Third, Hsu Hsi-hsiang's own career trajectory before nomination was transparently engineered. He rotated through the Coast Guard's ethics office, the National Security Council, and the Ministry of Justice as a political vice minister before being transferred to the Supreme Prosecutors Office as a chief prosecutor — a position he held only briefly, and only after it became clear that a confirmed chief prosecutor posting was a prerequisite for the nomination. Career professionals understood the sequence immediately. The Prosecutors Association concluded there was nothing meaningful left to poll about. The damage to institutional credibility was done before the Legislative Yuan held a single confirmation hearing.
President Lai appears not to have grasped the full weight of what followed from the legislature's rejection. By appointing Hsu in an acting capacity regardless, he did four things simultaneously. He signaled contempt for the legislature's constitutional oversight role. He installed a Prosecutor General who does not command unambiguous respect within the institution he now leads, even if most professionals have chosen silence over open dissent. He handed critics a structurally stronger argument for dismissing any major prosecution brought under Hsu's authority as politically motivated — an argument that, however unfair to individual investigators, will now attach to every significant case. And he repeated a pattern that has preceded every major transfer of power in Taiwan's democratic history: when judicial institutions lose credibility beyond a recoverable threshold, political turnover follows. The precedents are not obscure. Lee Teng-hui's (李登輝) era ended amid pervasive black-gold corruption. Chen Shui-bian went to prison. Ma Ying-jeou's presidency was consumed by the political warfare he helped ignite. Tsai Ing-wen presided over a progressive erosion of confidence in institutions stretching from the prosecutors' offices through the courts to the Constitutional Court. Each collapse compounded the next.
The more obediently Hsu Hsi-hsiang defers to the president who appointed him over legislative objection, the faster the remaining public trust in Taiwan's prosecutorial system dissolves. President Lai has not yet reckoned with the full cost of that dynamic — but the institution is already paying it. （Related： Exclusive | Former U.S. Intel Chief: Stalling Taiwan’s Defense Bill Is Inviting Tyranny ｜ Latest ）
This editorial reflects the views of Storm Media's editorial board.
