Taiwan's Premier Cho Jung-tai faced calls to apologize in the Legislative Yuan this week over a carcinogenic cooking oil scandal centered on Central Union Oil Corp. (中聯油脂) — and shot back at opposition lawmakers instead. "Is today's session a special report, or a special apology?" he retorted, refusing to offer either contrition or his resignation.
The scandal erupted at the end of June, when the Taichung-based supplier reported that some 1,300 metric tons of its soybean salad oil contained benzo[a]pyrene, a Group 1 carcinogen, at four times the legal limit. The tainted oil, produced in early April, had already flowed through Taisun Enterprise, Fwusow Industry, and Formosa Oilseed Processing into hundreds of downstream products before regulators were notified — a delay that earned Central Union a record NT$165.2 million (US$5.2 million) fine, the largest ever imposed by Taiwan's central government in a food safety case.
The exchange has revived a ghost from 2014 that the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) would rather forget. When a tainted-oil scandal engulfed the then-Kuomintang government, DPP chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen — who would later serve two terms as president — delivered one of the most memorable rebukes in Taiwan's food-safety history: "It's one thing to be incompetent, but this government cannot even safeguard what the people eat. Tainted products should be pulled from the shelves — and this government should be pulled from power!"
Twelve years on, her words read less like an attack on the KMT than an indictment of her own party's government under President Lai Ching-te.
Tsai's 2014 Standard Now Indicts Her Own Party
In October 2014, after substandard oil imported from Vietnam was found in Ting Hsin Group products, the DPP demanded that President Ma Ying-jeou apologize and that Premier Jiang Yi-huah step down "for his incompetence and cover-up." Jiang did resign roughly six weeks later, taking political responsibility after the KMT's rout in that year's local elections. Ma's government was voted out little more than a year after that.
The DPP of 2014 insisted that ministerial accountability was basic political common sense. The DPP of 2026 has produced a premier who, in the editorial board's view, will not resign, will not disclose the full facts — and will not even say sorry.
The response timeline reinforces the contrast. In 2014, the DPP demanded that the government publish the flow of problem oil within three days. This time, the contaminated oil circulated in the market for nearly three months before the scandal broke, and — as the editorial notes — the central government's response still lagged by about two weeks. Cho's cabinet, rather than examining that delay, reportedly vented its anger at the Taichung city government for publishing distribution data first.
The recall policy drew fire of its own. In 2014, the DPP excoriated Ma-era officials for suggesting Ting Hsin's oil was still edible. This time, regulators initially ordered mandatory recalls only for products containing at least 20% of the problem oil — a threshold the editorial reads as writing a tolerance level for a carcinogen into policy. Only after days of public pressure did the Health Ministry expand the recall to every downstream product made with the tainted batches, regardless of proportion.
Ting Hsin Faced Detention While Central Union Executives Walked on Bail
The judicial contrast is no less pointed. In the Ting Hsin case, group executive Wei Ying-chung was held incommunicado in pretrial detention, and only secured release the following year on NT$300 million bail after repeated appeals. He was sentenced in 2020 to four years and eight months in prison, paid more than NT$170 million in fines and forfeited proceeds, and was paroled in 2021. Ting Hsin survived, but withdrew entirely from Taiwan's edible-oil and telecom (Taiwan Star) markets, retaining the Wei Chuan food brand and a professional baseball team.
In the Central Union case, Taichung prosecutors moved quickly, raiding six locations tied to the four oil companies and naming 11 defendants — but detention has been the exception, not the rule. Central Union chairman Tsai Ching-sung was released on NT$20 million bail. Fwusow chairman Hung Yao-kun and Taisun chairman Liu Wei-lung each posted NT$10 million; Formosa Oilseed chairman Wu Hsing-cheng posted NT$2 million after his family could not raise the NT$10 million prosecutors initially set; other executives and plant managers posted between NT$500,000 and NT$6 million. Prosecutors sought detention only for Central Union general manager Yu Ling-chung, citing risks of evidence tampering and collusion — but the Taichung District Court granted him NT$20 million bail after he admitted the alleged conduct, prompting an immediate appeal from prosecutors.
To be fair, corporate malfeasance does not automatically translate into ministerial guilt, and pretrial detention should never be a political performance. Whether these long-established firms imported carcinogenic oil deliberately or negligently remains to be determined. But the two cases now form a natural experiment: how Taiwan's justice system treats businesses close to the governing party versus those cast, in 2014, as "friends of Ma."
A Decade of DPP Food-Safety Promises Has Not Held the Border
Tsai did not merely criticize in 2014; as president she launched a "Five Rings of Food Safety" policy covering source control, production management, inspection, harsher penalties for offenders, and public oversight. Yet her eight years saw fipronil-contaminated eggs, expired eggs repackaged for sale, ractopamine detected in Taisugar pork, and Sudan red dye spreading through the supply chain — alongside the politically charged decisions to open Taiwan's market to food from areas affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster and to ractopamine-treated U.S. pork and beef.
President Lai upgraded the program to "Five Rings 2.0," and Cho, unlike his predecessor, has dutifully chaired regular food-safety meetings. The results, from sprouted potatoes to toxin-tainted apples, suggest the border controls the DPP once demanded are still failing. The only official so far to signal accountability is Hsu Fu, head of the Cabinet's Office of Food Safety — an office the DPP mocked in 2014 as an empty slogan with no clear mandate, yet never reorganized in a decade of governing, and which now conveniently supplies the party its one expendable scapegoat.
The deeper ailment, the editorial argues, is a governing party numbed by ten years in power. Cho has spent his two years and two months as premier in near-permanent combat with the opposition-controlled legislature — through a failed mass-recall campaign, through refusing to countersign or implement laws it passed while Lai declined to promulgate them, and through blaming the opposition for flood damage while approved water-management budgets sat unexecuted on his own desk. Criticizing is easy and governing is hard, whichever party holds power. But a government that once shouted "tainted products off the shelves" — and now cannot manage a single apology when the shelves are tainted on its watch — has contracted what the editorial calls politics' one incurable disease: an attitude people cannot stand. （Related： Why Taiwan's Toxic Oil Maker Always Passed Its Own Safety Tests ｜ Latest ）
Original Article in Chinese
