Exclusive | Even KMT Can't Rein In Taiwan's Most Disruptive Lawmaker

KMT at-large legislator Weng Hsiao-ling has made more enemies inside her own party than across the aisle — and shows no sign of stopping.

When Taiwan's Legislative Yuan closed its fifth session of the 11th term on August 27, 2026, most Kuomintang lawmakers were ready to pivot to year-end county and city elections. Instead, they found themselves managing the fallout from one of their own.

Weng, who ranked fourth on the KMT's proportional representation list in 2024, had proposed cutting NT$10 million and freezing NT$20 million from the Presidential Office's discretionary fund — leaving it without money to buy Mid-Autumn Festival gift boxes from disability sheltered workshops. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party pounced, lambasting the opposition for targeting welfare beneficiaries. The KMT, once again, absorbed the damage.

It was a familiar pattern for Weng, whose two-plus years in the legislature have produced a steady stream of controversy — not just from the DPP, but from within her own caucus.

The August 27 caucus meeting ended in applause: the party had filled a leadership vacancy by recalling New Taipei City legislator Hung Mong-kai as chief deputy secretary-general. Colleagues scattered for breakfast; Weng sat apart in her signature pink blazer, chatting with legislator Chen Yu-chen, a candidate for the Kinmen County executive seat. The conversation lasted nearly half an hour, alternating between laughter and visible tension.

Emerging from the room, Weng said nothing to the reporters waiting outside. She smiled through the questions and, when the elevator arrived, offered only: "Thank you, we're getting in. Okay, bye-bye."

In the three days before that silence, she had given three interviews — blasting the DPP for smearing her and warning that courting centrist voters would doom the KMT. "Everything I do," she told one broadcaster, "is what a legislator of the Republic of China should do."

KMT insiders call the pattern unsustainable. District legislators have warned Weng directly to stop trading barbs with the DPP, arguing that prolonged quarrels damage the sheltered workshops caught in the crossfire. Some have also urged caucus convener Fu Kun-chi to personally rein her in.

Weng's combativeness comes with a formidable pedigree. Born in Kaohsiung's Fengshan military dependents' village — her grandfather was a prominent local figure, her father a retired army lieutenant general — she earned her law doctorate from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her husband, Chen Chun-sheng, is a former Grand Justice of Taiwan's Constitutional Court. After returning from Germany, she joined the faculty at National Tsing Hua University, where she has taught since 2005. In 2008, President Ma Ying-jeou nominated her to Taiwan's National Communications Commission (NCC), the island's media regulator. In 2024, KMT chair Eric Chu placed her on the party's at-large list as a symbol of "media environment reform."

When the DPP challenges her credentials, Weng fires back that her legal knowledge and scholarship are "not for these people to judge." A senior KMT legislative aide told Storm Media that Weng drafts her bills herself and that the technical quality is above average. The problem, the aide said, lies elsewhere: "Some bills — her messaging is terrible."

Since taking her seat in February 2024, Weng has filed more than 200 bills and been the named sponsor on nearly every major cross-party fight — the "Congressional Reform" package, the Constitutional Litigation Act, the Recall Law amendments, and the annual budget battles.

Some fights came with full caucus backing. Others left the KMT scrambling. In November 2024, she proposed softening a Cross-Strait Relations Act provision informally known as the "Wu Szu-huai provision" — named after a former KMT legislator penalized for attending political events in China and standing at attention during China's national anthem — in a move critics said would benefit retired generals with Beijing ties. Fellow legislators withdrew their co-signatures one by one; Weng backed down only after the caucus abandoned her.

In early 2025, with KMT district legislators facing DPP-organized recall campaigns, Weng floated amendments to bar early collection of recall signatures. Her own colleagues denounced it as "adding fuel to fire." Chu distanced himself within hours, calling it "an individual legislator's view." In a closed-door meeting before the legislature's third term, he reportedly told at-large legislators not to "cause trouble" — read by most as aimed at Weng.

During the 2026 budget review, Speaker Han Kuo-yu publicly urged Weng to "think it over again" — a rare instance of the speaker directly addressing a legislator's specific bills. KMT colleagues privately called her positions "pointless." When votes came, they followed party discipline and backed her anyway, absorbing the political cost.

Internal DPP sentiment data showed Weng's negative rating hit 87% in the week after the discretionary fund controversy — higher than KMT chair Cheng Li-wun's 54.3%. Confronted with the figures, Weng laughed: strong DPP disapproval meant the blue camp was solidly behind her, she said, giving her "a different kind of pride."

KMT candidates preparing for local elections were not amused. Party insiders told Storm Media that Weng "lives in a world bounded by her most extreme supporters."

A senior KMT aide offered a harder-edged counterpoint: Weng's political judgment may be poor, but the party must ask whether the hardcore deep-blue constituency she channels could be managed any other way. "If all those extreme forces were distributed back across every blue legislator," the aide said, "could we even absorb that?"

That calculus has kept Weng in place. In March 2025, the KMT tapped her as committee convener for the Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee, then reversed at the last minute to reduce friction during the recall crisis. After the recalls ended with zero KMT losses, she got the post — and moved quickly, shepherding through a halt to civil servant and teacher pension cuts, a deep-blue priority, by December 2025. She also volunteered to draft the KMT's anti-death-penalty-abolition referendum arguments, prompting colleagues to joke she would finally be too busy to act as a "loose cannon."

People familiar with KMT caucus operations told Storm Media that the DPP has developed a deliberate "encirclement hunting" strategy against Weng, targeting her because her political instincts are a reliable liability. Every provocative proposal draws a DPP pile-on that competitive KMT district legislators then have to absorb.

The caucus offers little structural defense. Many KMT members are in their first term and reluctant to publicly defend Weng or compound a controversy. "New legislators have thinner skin," one KMT figure said. "They care more about their image." At best, they stay out of the way.

Weng is, by all accounts, unreachable through normal party channels. She drafts her own material, says what she thinks as she thinks it, and veteran caucus aides cannot slow her down. "She is an uncontrollable horse," one insider said.

Her record bears that out. Since taking office she has drawn laughs of disbelief from a former premier during questioning, confronted the defense minister with a map depicting the Chinese mainland as ROC territory, mocked the culture ministry's budget as "feed for the Bluebirds," told DPP legislators they were "arguing without knowledge," and declared to one opponent: "I'm simply above you."

After a brief post-controversy silence, she returned to form. On August 28 and 29, she posted on Facebook that freezing the premier's salary was "just a light punishment" and vowed that during the 2027 budget review she would "seriously find the feeders of the green media and the Bluebird movement."

The sixth session has not yet begun. Weng is already warming up.

Original Article in Chinese

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