Taiwan's Ministry of Culture has appointed veteran journalist and political commentator Chiang Chun-nan (江春男), 82, as the new chairman of the Central News Agency (CNA), drawing fresh scrutiny over a ruling party habit that critics say has never really gone away — political patronage disguised as public service.
The appointment, part of the 11th-term CNA board reshuffle announced this week, was praised by Culture Minister Lee Yuan (李遠), 75, who described Chiang as a lifelong public intellectual who had brought a critical spirit to Taiwanese journalism "across different eras." Few observers disputed the description. What many found harder to swallow was the timing and the optics.
A Critic of Patronage Who Became Its Beneficiary
Chiang, who built his reputation writing under the pen name Sima Wenwu (司馬文武), is no ordinary appointee. After the Democratic Progressive Party's first presidential victory in 2000, he served as deputy secretary-general of the National Security Council under President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) — then stepped down in 2005 and returned to the press with his pen sharpened rather than blunted. His columns from that period offered some of the sharpest takedowns of the Chen administration, skewering a ruling culture that, in his own words, had "elevated nepotism and political patronage to its peak," filling government posts with defeated candidates and departing local officials.
Those words have aged awkwardly. In the 21 years since Chiang wrote them, the DPP has governed through two more presidencies — Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文)'s and now Lai Ching-te (賴清德)'s — and the practice he decried has, by most independent accounts, only deepened. The irony not lost on commentators is that Chiang himself has spent nearly a decade as vice chairman of the National Culture and Arts Foundation, a position widely regarded as a ceremonial sinecure. The CNA chairmanship is, in effect, his second government-adjacent posting under DPP administrations.
CNA's Structural Limits on a New Chairman's Influence
Whatever Chiang's intentions, the scope of his editorial authority at CNA is likely to be narrow. The agency, which transitioned from a KMT party organ to a state-funded news organization in 1995 following the passage of the Central News Agency Establishment Act, has long operated on a dual-track model in which the director-general holds day-to-day editorial power. Incoming chairmen have historically ranged from highly interventionist to largely ceremonial, depending on personality.
The outgoing chairman, Li Yong-de (李永得), had already announced before last year that he would not seek a second term, effectively closing the chapter on a reported philosophical dispute with Director-General Hu Wan-ling (胡婉玲) over the agency's direction. Chiang steps into that vacancy — but into an institution where the space for a chairman to steer editorial affairs remains limited. His real function may be to lend the agency enough institutional gravitas to reduce controversy rather than to drive news coverage.
The Wufu Qiansui Label — Coined by Chiang, Now Worn by Him
The appointment carries a particular kind of poetic irony that Taiwanese political observers have not missed. In October 2013, Chiang published a widely read column coining the term *Wufu Qiansui* (五府千歲) — literally "the Five Millennial Kings," a reference to the five tutelary deity-kings venerated in Taiwanese folk religion — to mock what he saw as an aging generation of DPP politicians refusing to leave the stage. The column was prompted by then-politicians Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃) and Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) competing for party nominations despite being in their late 60s. Lu, furious, insisted that age was no barrier to new beginnings. Yu took it more lightly, accepting the honorific on the grounds that the Wufu Qiansui serve a protective, community-guarding function.
Chiang was 69 when he wrote that column. He is 82 now.
The piece ends less as a verdict than as an observation: that the line between principled reluctance and human accommodation — the simple difficulty of saying no to an offered post — may be universal, and that Chiang's situation is perhaps not so different from those he once satirized. Whether a chairman installed at 82 into a quasi-state media body represents a higher or lower order of the same phenomenon is, as the editorial puts it, genuinely hard to say. （Related： Taiwan's Drone 'National Team': Strategic Breakthrough or Expensive Mirage? ｜ Latest ）
