'Wholesale' disaster for Taiwan's
DPP By John J Tkacik Jr
TAIPEI - Chen Hsiu-ching, one of the successful
Kuomintang (KMT) candidates for Taiwan's Legislative
Yuan, representing Changhwa county or, more precisely,
Lu-kang township, is a pleasant woman of considerable
means. On November 29, with the election 12 days away,
Madame Chen was at work at her opulent campaign office
in downtown Lu-kang, decked out as an altar to the
goddess Ma-Tzu. She explained to this correspondent that
local politics are not about ideology or grand national
policies, even less are they about partisan loyalty. In
fact, Madame Chen supports the Democratic Progressive
Party (DPP) agenda of a new constitution and "national
identity" - within reason. The key, she said, is
"constituent service". Her husband, a former politician
himself until he was enmeshed in a financial scandal,
was her de facto campaign manager. His record in the
Legislative Yuan also was supportive of the DPP agenda.
He too said that Madame Chen's "constituent service"
would be the key factor in attracting "at least 40,000
votes", the number needed to guarantee one of the 10
seats allotted to Changhwa in the national legislature,
the Yuan.
In the run-up to elections, the roads
all up and down rural Changhwa county were festooned
with campaign flags of the 19 candidates and city
boulevards were vibrant with magnificent billboards
proclaiming the talents of the parliamentary hopefuls.
Despite Madame Chen's devotion to "constituent
services", this correspondent's money was on Chou
Ching-yu, the DPP's most popular politician and wife of
Examination Yuan president Yao Chia-wen, himself a
former political prisoner and one of the true heroes of
Taiwan's democratization. The DPP's grassroots campaign
stations were modest, but seemed well manned, their
volunteers ancient but committed. Madame Chou is well
loved in the county, and all polls showed her to be a
top vote-getter. As such, she was under much pressure to
campaign for the four other DPP candidates on the
19-name ballot. To get all five DPP candidates elected,
one out of three of Madame Chou's supporters would have
to cast their single vote for one of the other nominees
- spreading out the votes is key to party victories in
Taiwan's odd "multi-seat, single vote" district system.
If Madame Chou were to get too many votes, she would
win, but the other DPP candidates would not make the
cut. They too calculated that at least 35,000 votes were
needed for a seat (Madame Chen's 40,000 seemed to be a
conservative number).
Back in Taipei, the
pollsters were unanimous. The DPP was on a roll. The
party would sweep the south, and make significant gains
in the "blue" north (a reference to the area
traditionally dominated by the pan-blue opposition, so
called after the color of the KMT emblem). The DPP's
nominees in Taipei city were attractive, young,
cosmopolitan. The only contrarian analysis this
correspondent heard came from the American Institute in
Taiwan, the United States' "proto-embassy" in Taipei.
"The KMT is remarkably well organized in the south," one
US official confided. "A lot of it is under the radar."
Fast-forward to election day, last Saturday. In
DPP headquarters, a chat with a top campaign strategist
yielded the following poll data: more than 600 valid
responses to more than 3,000 phone calls, indicating an
even larger DPP victory across the island than
previously estimated. According to this later poll, the
pan-greens (after the color of the DPP emblem) stood to
gain at least 114 seats out of a total 225, an absolute
majority for the DPP for the first time in history.
But down at street level, a group of American
scholars were interviewing Bi-khim Hsiao, the
US-educated (Oberlin College, Ohio) DPP legislator who
chaired the party's international-affairs department.
She was running for the first time as a district
candidate (not on the party's proportional slate). A
young, tireless politician in her own right, she
appeared exhausted on Saturday morning - in contrast to
her own startling sky-blue campaign billboards showing a
strikingly pretty "Ivory Soap" model with twinkling eyes
and a perfect smile and wearing a sporty baseball
jersey. "For the past two weeks, things have been cool,"
she fretted. Despite her massive popularity among
younger voters, which placed her at the top of the DPP
candidate slate, she worried that she might lose. The
previous day's newspapers carried DPP campaign ads
urging Taipei's DPP supporters to pei-piao or
"coordinate their votes". Hsiao's admirers were asked to
vote for other candidates instead, based upon their
identification-card serial numbers. Her worries, she
said, were justified by the experience of the KMT's most
popular politician in the 2001 elections, Ding
Shou-chung, who lost. The vast majority of his
supporters all assumed he had enough votes and voted for
weaker KMT candidates instead.
This time, Ding
wasn't taking chances. There would be no pei-piao
this time around. All his supporters, he insisted,
should darn well vote for him.
It seems as
though they did. On Saturday evening, this
correspondent's delegation, a group of eight American
and Australian scholars invited to observe the elections
by the non-partisan Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, sat
at the campaign headquarters of the second-most-popular
KMT candidate, John Chang (son of the late president
Chiang Ching-kuo and, of course, grandson of Chiang
Kai-shek - don't be surprised by the difference in the
spelling of the surname, John is the natural son of
Chiang Ching-kuo but took his mother's name at birth).
When the final returns were in, John Chang smiled
broadly and announced he was the second-highest
vote-getter in Taipei. The highest? "Ding Shou-chung,"
John announced. Both John and Ding had garnered enough
votes to elect another two KMT candidates, but neither
was taking any chances. First dibs for a seat in the
next legislature in 2008, which under a pending
constitutional amendment will cut the number of seats in
half, go to those KMT candidates with the highest votes.
As for Hsiao, she came in seventh. That placed
her high enough to grab a seat in the Legislative Yuan,
but put her behind three much weaker DPP names, all of
whom obviously benefited from sympathetic
pei-piao, coordinated votes, to the north of
Taipei.
'Wholesale' politics end in
disaster Chou Ching-yu, the DPP's most popular
politician in Changhwa county, was not so fortunate.
There was no pei-piao in Changhwa. But back in
November, there was no need, she explained. "Each DPP
family decides who should vote for which candidate, so
there is a natural pei-piao." The natural
pei-piao was a disaster, however. Without a
formal apportioning of votes, tens of thousands of
Madame Chou's supporters all assumed she had enough
support and cast their ballots for the weaker candidates
- paradoxically, the weakest DPP candidate in Changhwa
got the most votes.
On Saturday night, when the
firecracker smoke had cleared away and the television
shows had announced the final tallies, the DPP's
"wholesale" politics proved to be a disaster. Such
politics relied on mass public relations, celebrity
appearances by President Chen Shui-bian, Vice President
Annette Lu and former president Lee Teng-hui stumping
across the island for weeks on end, speechifying about
issues they thought would mobilize their base.
The polls all showed this was effective.
Telephone interviews seemed to show that issues of
"national identity" and "a new constitution" were
popular. But neither was popular enough actually to get
people to vote. In fact, as one DPP analyst said to me
the day after the balloting, the "shallow green" voters
who are okay with "independence" and all that, but who
didn't make it their life's work, had become
uncomfortable with the shrillness of the rhetoric. The
shrillness seemed to increase as the pollsters
reinforced the idea that "independence" and "national
identity" were popular. The decibel level of the
campaign - on both the DPP green and KMT blue sides of
the debate - was deafening to the "shallow greens",
those not passionately committed. On Saturday, they just
stayed home.
Of course, Madame Chen, the KMT
candidate in Lu-kang, won handily. More than 45,000
voters gave her their undying support. She didn't
pei-piao. She offered "constituent service". It
would be too crass to say that "constituent service"
amounted to a red packet with a crisp NT$1,000 (US$32)
note in it. Forty-five thousand votes at NT$1,000 each
is about US$1.3 million; no problem for a prominent
business family like Madame Chen's, but it would be
wrong. So let's just say Madame Chen knows how to take
care of her constituents. Her husband's constituent
services were not simple day-before-the-election
affairs, but serious, continual cultivations of
constituent support in Lu-kang.
The source from
the American Institute in Taiwan had it right. The KMT
was well organized "under the radar" in southern Taiwan.
Madame Chen's retail politics saved the day for the KMT.
But it might not save the party's leadership.
Retail politics means that local KMT politicians of
considerable personal wealth are no longer beholden to
the party, and now have the leverage to vote however
they want. One very senior KMT officer told my
delegation that it would be best for the present KMT
leadership to retire and let the younger men and women
rise. Indeed, John Chang himself said "the leadership
should retire" and, staring at the wide-eyed disbelief
of his American visitors, added: "Everything I say is on
the record." We scribbled it down obligingly.
The next morning, another Taiwanese politician
sullenly observed to me: "There are now four colors in
the Legislative Yuan: green, blue, black and gold" -
black-gold being Taiwanese slang for underworld crime
and a reference to corrupt businessmen.
As is
the case with every other democratic experience, and
America's is no exception, it takes a while to iron out
the kinks. Taiwan's infant democracy, only 18 years
since the first real opposition party was formed and
only eight years since its first free presidential
election, has gotten off to a promising start.
John J Tkacik Jr is a resident fellow
in Asian Studies at the Heritage Foundation in
Washington, DC. He is a retired officer in the US
Foreign Service who served in Taipei, Beijing, Hong Kong
and Guangzhou and was chief of the China division in the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
He has been watching Taiwan politics for 30 years.
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