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Taiwan politics curiouser and
curiouser
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - These are strange days for Taiwan's
once-mighty Kuomintang (KMT). The party, having ruled
China for a quarter of a century and Taiwan for 50
years, is unused to being out of power, as it has been
since May 2000. With a presidential election less than
14 months away it is prepared to do anything it can to
regain its customary eminence. But its two latest moves
show a desperation verging on the eccentric.
Last week the party conspired in its own bilking
to the tune of about US$10 million. And the party has
also launched a new publicity campaign designed to win
Taiwanese hearts and minds based on the theme of the
superiority of life under Chiang Ching-kuo, Taiwan's
last dictator, often known simply by his initials, CCK,
using slogans such as "CCK, Taiwan misses you" and
"those good old days when people were full of hope".
Curiouser and curiouser.
The explanation for
this strange behavior lies in the party's embarrassment
over its recent past. Between Chiang's death in 1988 and
the party's defeat in the presidential election of 2000
it was led by Lee Teng-hui, who also took over the
presidency.
At the time Lee came to power,
Taiwan was an international joke, with its ludicrous
pretensions to be the "real" government of China, its
refusal to have anything to do with the "bandits" in
power in Beijing, its lawmakers last elected in China in
1947 and waiting for "reunification" before another
election could take place.
Lee turned this into
a respectable little democracy that is seen by the
current regime in Washington as a model of the kind of
government it would like to see elsewhere in the region.
One might think, therefore, it would be the Lee
years, years of unparalleled prosperity, growing
political recognition, and huge advances in civil
liberties and the rule of law, that the KMT should be
nostalgic about.
The problem is that, since his
departure from office, and after being booted out of the
KMT chairmanship following the 2000 election debacle,
Lee has revealed himself in his true colors, which
happen to be exactly the opposite of the core ideology
of his own party.
The KMT reveres its Chinese
heritage, sees Taiwanese culture as a somewhat
degenerate folk culture bastardized by its exposure to
Japanese influences during the 1895-1945 colonial era,
and seeks eventual reunification with China.
Lee
revels in the cultural mix that is modern Taiwan, has
strong connections with Japan, where he was educated,
probably in his heart despises China for its
backwardness, and certainly seeks Taiwan's de jure
independence.
One of Lee's major tasks has been
to nurture the formation of a Taiwanese national
consciousness, and he has spoken of the decades of
Taiwan's subjugation to alien regimes, be it the
Japanese or the KMT from China as part of "the tragedy
of being a Taiwanese".
Since leaving office Lee
has become the spiritual head of the Taiwan Solidarity
Union (TSU), a small political party with a blazing
pro-Taiwan-independence agenda. He has also been thrown
out of the KMT.
The irony is that while Lee led
the KMT he stayed just enough within the boundaries of
party propriety to avoid full-scale rebellion, paying
lip service to KMT ideology even if with a wink to the
pro-independence opposition.
It must surely be
one of the stranger political tales of our time, a man
who rises to the apex of a party whose ideology he
secretly despises and then conspires with the opposition
to strip that party of much of its power. Imagine George
W Bush, through sheer guile, becoming general secretary
of the old Soviet Communist Party, and that is something
like the Lee years in Taiwan.
There were, of
course, KMT members who knew that Lee was a cuckoo in
the nest. But Lee outfoxed them at every turn, leaving
them utterly marginalized.
For the KMT this
presents a problem beyond sheer embarrassment. With an
election campaign to kick off perhaps 10 months from
now, on what basis can it campaign? It can hardly
criticize the current Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
government and exhort people to return to the party that
was so good for Taiwan in the 1990s, because the man who
utterly dominated the KMT during that period now tells
voters not to vote for the KMT and has thrown the
support of his TSU behind the DPP government.
The KMT cannot lay claim to Lee's political
legacy - for ideological reasons it wouldn't want to,
despite the great popularity among the people of Taiwan
of Lee's ideas. But before Lee all there is is the
authoritarianism of Chiang Kai-shek and his son CCK. The
elder Chiang's harsh repression is irredeemable and also
simply too far away. But the CCK era can, the KMT
thinks, be spun to look like a time of booming
prosperity in which living standards shot up. In the
current tough economic times this, the party thinks, is
a legacy for which the KMT deserves credit and doesn't
have to be ashamed of.
The problem is, of
course, that it demands a rather selective memory. It
asks Taiwanese to remember that CCK's time was a time of
mushrooming wealth, but relies on them forgetting that
it was a time of ugly political repression, show trials
and assassination.
The KMT's solution to this is
to paint CCK as an embattled leader with democratic
inclinations that for many years were thwarted by
external events - Taiwan's loss of its UN seat and
almost all diplomatic allies, the United States'
recognition of Beijing - only being allowed to bloom in
the final two years of his life when he allowed the
formation of an opposition political party - the DPP in
fact - and lifted martial law, which had been in place
for 38 years.
How effective this will prove is
anybody's guess. Because of Taiwan's isolation, rigorous
censorship and limitations on overseas travel, few
Taiwanese have a good grasp of geopolitics in the late
1970s and early '80s.
An outsider would say that
CCK's burst of liberalism was as much due to the lessons
learned from watching the fall of the shah of Iran,
Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and, most tellingly,
Ferdinand Marcos next door in the Philippines.
CCK could see that the game for anti-communists
was up, that the United States simply wasn't prepared to
step in to save ultra-repressive regimes simply because
of their anti-communist credentials, especially as the
US was furious with Taiwan over the assassination by a
hit man hired by its security services of the writer
Henry Liu in California in 1984. And Liu's "crime?" To
write a critical biography of CCK.
How many
Taiwanese grasp this, however, is far from clear. The
media are overwhelmingly supportive of the KMT or its
offshoot the People First Party, and so the 15th
anniversary last month of CCK's death produced endless
hagiography, but this has to be offset against a quite
remarkable resistance to spin among Taiwanese, an
underestimation of which proved disastrous to the KMT in
the last election.
The immediate reason for the
party's loss of power in 2000 was that the anti-DPP vote
was split between the KMT's candidate Lien Chan, at that
time vice president, and James Soong, a KMT maverick,
incensed that the party, or rather Lee, chose Lien and
not him as its candidate and who went on to run an
independent campaign in which he came within 3
percentage points of victory and beat Lien into a
humiliating third place. Lien is now chairman of the KMT
while Soong is chairman of the PFP, which mostly
consists of hardline reunificationists who have deserted
the KMT.
Lien, incidentally, is a politician so inept
that some of the more conspiratorially minded think
that he was raised by Lee in the KMT hierarchy over
the far more able Soong as a poisoned chalice passed on
to the party whose influence Lee sought to wreck.
Received political wisdom in Taiwan says a split
ticket in 2004 will again prove disastrous. As a result,
great efforts are being made to ensure KMT-PFP
cooperation. There is a general agreement that Lien and
Soong should share the ticket. The question is: who is
to be the presidential candidate and who the running
mate?
Discussions are supposed to take place
about this next week. But the simple fact is that Lien
has no wish to be vice president again. He will only
accept the presidential nomination. As a result the
discussions are not going to be about who will do what -
though this is how they are portrayed - but rather about
the price Soong may demand for playing second fiddle.
This is expected to include a promise from Lien
that he will serve only one term and that Soong also
take the premiership, ie, have day-to-day control of the
cabinet as well as the largely powerless vice
presidency.
But Soong might reasonably ask why
Lien sees himself as a presidential candidate. He was,
after all, soundly rejected at the polls last time.
Lien, perhaps, realizes the only way he will ever get
the presidency is by being pushed into it by the weight
of Soong's popular support. But why should Soong agree
to this?
The KMT has recently been trying to
sweeten the pill. One of the main bones of contention
between Lien and Soong revolves around accusations made
by the KMT during the last election campaign that Soong,
when he was secretary general of the party in the early
1990s, bilked the party of about $10 million by setting
up a secret account in the names of various family
members of his to which he transferred KMT funds. Known
as the Chung Hsing Bills Finance scandal, after the name
of the company where the secret accounts were set up,
the accusation of embezzlement might have cost Soong the
last election, and has unsurprisingly been a subject of
rancor between Soong and the KMT ever since.
In
the last week of January, the KMT sought to patch things
up with Song by declaring that the fraud accusations
were all a big mistake. Soong had been entrusted with
the money by Lee Teng-hui, the KMT said - and Soong
himself has argued - for "party tasks", whatever those
are supposed to be.
Lee has, by the way, denied
that he ever directed Soong to do such a thing, and most
Taiwanese believe that even in an organization with as
much to hide about its finances as the KMT, putting
money in your son's bank account is a strange way to
finance miscellaneous party activities.
Nevertheless, Lien's camp has tried to recast
the embezzlement allegations as a mistake, prompted as a
campaign strategy by Lee himself - something else that
is highly implausible given the negligible degree of
involvement of Lee in Lien's campaign.
Hardly
anybody believes the KMT's version of events and
probably a slim majority believes that Soong did
embezzle the money after all. So the KMT's abandoning
the Chung Hsing Bills case has been widely interpreted
as a sweetener for Soong to help repair his rift with
Lien and to encourage him to accept the
vice-presidential slot.
Lien said, just before
leaving for a European trip two weeks ago, that he
wanted the question of who would have which places on
the presidential ticket settled by April. An early
decision favors Lien because, as the election nears,
Soong's hugely greater popularity will put him in more
of a commanding position.
But will Soong accept
this? Some commentators say he has no choice; he lacks
both funds and party organization and needs the KMT to
supply these things. Others point out that at least he
has a party; in 2000 he didn't even have that and he
still almost won.
The alternative for Soong
would be to run a campaign against Lien and the current
incumbent, the DPP's Chen Shui-bian, in a rerun of 2000.
And Soong should fancy his chances. The wishy-washy DPP
is a disappointment to its hardcore Taiwan-independence
supporters and its inability to boost the sagging
economy and embarrassing about-faces on major policies
have sapped the confidence of others. The KMT is far
weaker than it was in 2000. Lien, without Soong, might
lose up to 8 percentage points on his miserable 24
percent showing three years ago. These votes are
unlikely to go to Chen and could give Soong the
presidency.
And this is where it becomes
complicated. For there is one way for Lien to rescue his
own campaign if Soong will not play ball. That is to
enlist Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou, the only star
candidate in the KMT's ranks, as his running mate. That
would not lead to a Lien victory, but it would deny
Soong the presidency - in such a scenario the anti-DPP
vote would be split so evenly that Chen should cruise to
a second term.
If Soong really wants to prevent
this from happening, than he has one option, which is to
recruit Ma to his own camp. Whether the squeaky-clean
mayor, whose formidable reputation is based in part on
his being thought above political intrigue, would go for
this is anybody's guess, but he is believed not to like
Soong on a personal level.
The smart money
therefore has to go on Soong acquiescing to play second
fiddle to Lien, at least for the time being. but as the
campaign nears, tensions between the two could still
result in a split and an eventual three-cornered race.
KMT-PFP cooperation has been attempted in the last two
major election campaigns, for legislators and county
heads in 2001 and for city councilors and mayors last
December, and has no success of which it can boast. The
DPP is hoping that old animosities die hard.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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