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Taiwan: Chen's mysterious constitution
ploy
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI
- It was a rousing birthday gift to party faithful who
latterly thought their leader had forgotten what the
party was supposed to be about. On September 28, as his
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) celebrated its 17th
birthday, President Chen Shui-bian told a celebratory
rally that a central aim of his administration, should
he be re-elected in the presidential election next
March, would be the rewriting of Taiwan's constitution.
This is the kind of robust stuff DPP faithful
like to hear. The party was, after all, founded on the
idea of establishing Taiwan as a de jure independent
state, rather than, as is desired by both Beijing and
Taiwan's opposition parties, reunifying the island with
mainland China. What else could a new constitution be
focused on, supporters asked, than bringing independence
about?
But talk of Taiwanese independence is a
very inflammatory topic, particularly when produced by
the president, generating acute nervousness in
Washington and rabid anger in Beijing. China has, after
all, threatened a military assault upon Taiwan should it
declare independence - in its more bellicose moments,
China has even threatened an assault if Taiwan doesn't
open negotiations on reunification with sufficient
speed. So is Chen courting disaster, and if so, why?
Taking these question in reverse order, Chen's
sudden enthusiasm for constitutional change was
immediately interpreted as an election ploy, as his
governmental policies have done little until recently to
appeal to his core of support.
His party was
once seen as opposed to the kind of corporate state the
Kuomintang (KMT) created during its half-century of
rule, where the ruling party was given direction by a
central committee, which read like a who's who of
Taiwan's top businessmen. The DPP was supposed to stand
for everything that the KMT's business-politics nexus
compromised, from freedoms such as the right to organize
labor unions to the protection of Taiwan's badly
degraded environment; its social-justice agenda led many
of Taiwan's wealthy to expect a "soak the rich"
tax-and-spend policy to set up elements of a welfare
state that, in present-day Taiwan, can barely yet even
be called rudimentary.
If this was what Chen's
supporters expected, they have been singularly
disappointed during his time in office. One problem was
that Chen's election win coincided with the United
States' dot-com bust and his ascension to power two
months later with the onset of the US recession. On top
of this, Taiwan's own stock market - long the highly
manipulated plaything of the KMT - collapsed.
The result was, in 2001, the first negative
economic growth Taiwan had experienced for 30 years.
Little of the blame for this can be placed on Chen. If
anything, it is the result of the KMT's shortsightedness
in over-reliance on one market - the United States - and
one sector - information technology - and its thinking
that demand was infinitely expandable for ever.
Nevertheless, the accident of the recession
hitting as Chen took power looked bad, and for the first
two years of his administration he played the part of
the business community's best friend. While there was
little he could do to fix the economy - a US upturn was
needed for that - he spent a lot of time in displacement
activity, truckling to the business community in an
effort to persuade voters that he was trying to fix
things. Chen also appeared more interested in driving
forward direct trade and transportation links with
mainland China then he did about handling Taiwan's
unemployment problem, much of it the result of the loss
of manufacturing job across the Taiwan Strait. The
result has been a steady rise in the number of Taiwanese
who see Chen as being in the pocket of the corporations
and abandoning his earlier pro-social-justice stance.
The disillusionment with Chen comes on top of a
great disappointment at the very outset of his
assumption of office. As part of his inauguration
speech, Chen reneged on several issues that were close
to the hearts of his supporters by promising "five nos":
no declaration of independence; no change in the
nation's title; no referendum to change the status quo;
no incorporating the idea of China and Taiwan being two
separate states into the constitution; and no abandoning
the National Reunification Council, a body set up to
find ways and means to bring unification about.
Since these five policies represent the core of
DPP beliefs - at least until Chen took over as party
leader last year - their abandonment - touted as a
gesture of goodwill toward China, but in fact demanded
by policymakers of the administration of US president
Bill Clinton who were seriously alarmed that Chen's
election victory would upset the Taiwan Strait status
quo - has been seen by some of the DPP hard core as
verging on apostasy.
So given what a
disappointment Chen has been to his supporters, one
might think it only smart politics as an election looms
to rekindle the fires of radicalism. But second thoughts
suggest this is not really necessary. After all, Chen is
the only candidate from the even nominally
pro-independence camp in the running. His opponents are
KMT chairman Lien Chan and the chairman of the People
First Party (PFP), James Soong. In 2000 it was the
rivalry between Lien and Soong, leading them to make
separate bids for the presidency, thereby splitting the
anti-Chen vote, which let Chen into office.
All
told, the two won 60 percent of the vote. Now they are
part of a joint ticket. And, far worse from the
traditional DPP supporter's point of view, in its three
years out of office the KMT has changed from a party
that paid only lip service to reunification to one
ardently promoting the idea. Soong even occasionally
speaks well of China's "one country, two systems"
policy. For Taiwanese-independence supporters, the
Lien-Soong ticket is a hugely formidable challenge with
what they see as a potentially apocalyptic result. Fed
up as they are with Chen, they simply cannot afford to
let him fail. Such support hardly needs bolstering.
Nor would it actually be bolstered by the kind
of thing Chen thinks a new constitution should be
concerned with. In the week following Chen's
announcement, DPP officials as well as Taiwan's
representative in Washington were quick to point out
that the move did not mean an abandonment of Chen's five
nos. Rather the move was concerned with the adjustment
of the technical apparatus of government, for example
the resolution of confusion about whether the premier or
the president is the chief executive of government, the
adoption of a voting system less open to manipulation by
candidates from small factions and vote buying, and a
reduction in the number of seats in the legislature.
All this seems tepid stuff indeed - even China
could hardly get upset about it. Furthermore, even the
KMT and PFP, which have previously fetishized the
constitution, since it was drawn up in China in 1947 and
marks the continuity of Taiwan's past as a part of
China, have said they are not opposed to change per se.
Some political commentators therefore see Chen's
move as something to appeal to middle-of-the-road
floating voters. Few Taiwanese know or care much about
the constitution, but despite that, many seem to have
formed the opinion that something passed for the
government of China in the 1940s has little relevance to
21st-century Taiwan. The fact that the old constitution
has been amended frequently in the past decade shows
that it is inefficient and inadequate, they might think.
Greater efficiency might have an appeal.
This
was certainly the line Chen was playing up on Tuesday
when he said that in the context of globalization,
industrial transformation and the growth of the Chinese
market, Taiwan needed a "rational legislature, the
administrative leadership of a cabinet whose power and
responsibility are consistent with each other, sound
relations between the administrative and legislative
branches and a streamlined and efficient government
structure".
But it is hard not to think that
courting middle-of the-road voters might be done far
more effectively by simply appealing to their greed.
After all, the number of people who really care about
the voting system compared with, say, the number who
want to see a proper old-age-pension system or more free
schooling, is extremely small. Why should Chen talk
about changing the constitution when he would get more
votes with talk about soaking the rich?
Domestically, therefore, it is hard to justify
why Chen and his team see constitution change as a
vote-winner. The pro-independence camp has nowhere to go
but Chen, while the issue hardly appeals to floating
voters.
It is also not even clear how Chen
thinks the change will come about. Currently the
constitution requires three-quarters of the legislature
to pass a motion for constitutional change, and the
likelihood of Chen's DPP and its allies controlling 75
percent of legislative seats in the near future is
almost infinitesimally small. Even if this were to
occur, the motion would then be passed to the National
Assembly, which is convened on an ad hoc basis with
seats allocated to parties depending on the proportion
of votes received in legislative elections and which
also needs a 75 percent support rate to pass a motion.
Once again the DPP's weakness in the legislature and the
hostility of opposition parties would doom radical
change to failure. For this reason, when Chen first
announced his plan, the opposition parties thought it
barely worth commenting upon.
But in the 10 days
since Chen first made his announcement, it has become
clear that the DPP does not want to follow the old
constitutional architecture. Rather, it will seek to
have the National Assembly abolished by a referendum, it
will summon a constitutional convention and then will
have another referendum on whether to approve the new
constitution the convention comes up with. Such a plan
makes little sense. How could a referendum first abolish
the National Assembly without a change in the
constitution? Using its current architecture - which
would make such a change almost impossible to pass - to
allow this, would, in fact, make referendums the
ultimate test for all proposed constitutional change.
The policy seems mired in confusion, though the DPP has
promised clarification within the next two months.
So it is hard to see why Chen thinks
constitutional change a vote-winner. The plan's
execution is confusing, while among voters, the people
Chen has most alienated have no choice but to vote for
him anyway, while the people he needs to win over are
more interested in practical matters. However, it
ultimately might be that the constitutional change
proposals are directed across the Taiwan Strait.
China is notoriously touchy about anything that
it considers a move toward Taiwan's " independence". And
in the past it has suggested that for Taiwan to rewrite
its constitution might be to cross one of China's
various red lines. Pro-independence Taiwanese have even
suggested that the next few years, the run-up to the
2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, are an ideal time
to force through measures that China abhors, since
Beijing's hands will be tied by wanting to hold on to
the Games. According to this theory, 2006 would be an
ideal time to rewrite the constitution - with far more
radical pro-independence changes than Chen seems to be
contemplating - and 2008 itself would be the best time
to change the country's name.
If such ideas seem
outrageously provocative, it should be stressed that
they belong to the radical fringe of the independence
movement, and the ultra-cautious Chen has never shown
sympathy toward them. But with an election in the
offing, Chen can hardly have forgotten the lesson the
last two presidential elections have taught: that the
stronger and more bellicose China's intervention, the
more disastrous the result for the perceived pro-China
side. In other words, if you want to win a presidential
election, get China mad at you.
Is this what
Chen is up to? On the one hand he can talk up the size
of the change he wants to make, thus angering China,
while on the other his officials can tell the United
States those changes involve technical measures not
calculated to push any red buttons, thereby avoiding US
criticism about being too provocative. It could be,
therefore, that the DPP is using the constitution issue
as a red rag to the Chinese bull, knowing that this
could benefit the party at the polls.
But so far
China has barely deigned to notice Chen's speech and the
subsequent frenzy of debate among Taiwan's chattering
classes, all of which reminds one of the Sherlock Holmes
story Silver Blaze where Holmes talks of the
"curious incident of the dog in the night". When Watson
points out that the dog did nothing in the night, Holmes
remarks: "That was the curious incident."
In the
past, China would have been expected to see Chen's
remarks as hugely provocative and would have barked very
loudly. Its silence this time shows a far greater
understanding of how to play Taiwan than has been seen
hitherto. Whether this is to be ascribed to the new
leadership of Hu Jintao or the rapport built up with the
KMT during that party's three years in the Taiwanese
political wilderness, or both, it is difficult to say.
But if the DPP is putting its hopes on an angry China to
give Chen's campaign a boost, it may well be
disappointed. It will have to be a lot more provocative
yet - a thought that may be a rather worrying.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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