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The KMT power struggle in
Taiwan
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Lien Chan, the chairman of
Taiwan's largest opposition party, the Kuomintang
(KMT), on Thursday announced that he will step
down from his post in August after an election for
a successor in May. This followed several weeks of
will-he, won't-he speculation as to his
intentions.
After legislative elections in
December in which Lien's party did surprisingly
well, it was thought that, having in part redeemed
himself from the ignominy of two
presidential-election defeats, Lien would be
content to pass on the baton. But during February
this has seemed, at times, an increasingly remote
possibility.
Over the Lunar New Year
holiday, Lien announced that he was thinking of
seeking another term in the post, which made one
of the contenders for his job, Speaker of the
legislature Wang Jin-pyng, who is also a KMT vice
chairman (there are five), withdraw from the race
before he had actually entered it. Wang said he
would not seek to challenge Lien if he decided to
remain in the post, adding, with a typical
flourish of his trademark unctuous flattery, that
Lien continuing in the job would be the best thing
for all concerned.
While a number of party
elders seemed to throw their weight behind Lien's
continued leadership, the idea lost traction over
the last week leading to Lien's announcement on
Thursday.
The principal reason for this is
that whoever becomes party chairman will lead the
party into the next legislative elections at the
end of 2007, and a presidential election in March
2008. Lien might have redeemed some amour
propre last December but it should be clear to
anyone that a politician in his 70s with such a
miserable track record, who also conspicuously
lacks the popular touch crucial for electioneering
- Lien has been described as a "charisma-free
zone" - is ill-suited to lead the party at such a
crucial time.
A secondary reason is that
the KMT has been planning to elect Lien's
successor by a popular ballot of its membership
for the first time ever. This represents a
remarkable step forward for the party, which
previously has elected its leaders via the vote of
a party congress of delegates from local branches.
Given that the congress vote also involved
spectacularly corrupt elections to the party's
central committee, this was never a model of the
democratic process. Even more to the point was the
fact that there was never, under the old system,
more than one candidate for the job. It was
therefore more in the nature of an anointing by
the party congress of whoever had been the most
successful at high-level infighting.
The
KMT is anxious, however, to burnish its democratic
credentials and convince the Taiwanese public that
the days when everything was stitched up in the
private rooms of expensive restaurants are long
gone. There was therefore the possibility of a
genuine election this year, ie, with more than one
candidate and the pool of voters large enough to
avoid the outcome being decided solely by
cash-filled envelopes as of yore. This could not
have happened had Lien decided to seek another
term.
Lien's departure is, therefore, also
driven by the widely felt need within the party to
present itself in a way that is more attractive to
the general public and to show conclusively that
it has put the habits of its authoritarian past
behind it.
Contending the chairmanship
will be Wang, though he has yet to announce
officially that he is in the running, and Ma
Ying-jeou, the mayor of Taipei, who announced this
month that he intended to make a bid and has been
roundly pilloried by party elders since for not
having the grace to wait on Lien's final decision
before putting himself forward as a candidate.
The prospect of a Ma-versus-Wang race is
attractive, even to non-supporters of the party
because it might help to define what the KMT is
actually about. Each of the candidates will have
to present a vision of what the party is and, more
important, in what direction it should be trying
to steer the country. Whoever wins the
chairmanship will be well placed to become the
party's presidential candidate in 2008 and, given
the weakness of possible contenders from the
ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), there
is a very strong chance they might be Taiwan's
next president. The chairmanship election will be
a good opportunity to see what is on offer as the
candidates set out their stores.
At first
glance it appears to be a classic Taiwan race, the
difference between the two men being the cleavage
that defines Taiwan's fractured society as a whole
- mainlander versus Taiwanese.
Ma was born
in Hong Kong of exiles fleeing Chiang Kai-shek's
defeat in the civil war. He is the son of a KMT
apparatchik, and has worked for the party his
entire life. He was a popular minister of justice,
and twice has been elected mayor of Taipei by
comfortable majorities. Ma also has the reputation
of being utterly incorruptible - unusual in the
KMT.
He is also a strong supporter of
unification with mainland China; in fact he is
often sneered at by his critics as being someone
who seeks to become the Hong Kong-style chief
executive of the Taiwan Special Administrative
Region. This is almost certainly unfair, since
Ma's democratic credentials are strong and he has
been highly critical of China on its human-rights
record, its lack of democracy, and especially its
handling of demands in Hong Kong for more
democratization.
What Ma has going for him
is his family background - he was imbued with the
KMT's nationalist ideals of a powerful united
China taking its rightful place in the world,
virtually with his mother's milk. He has shown
himself electable, he is popular, he is competent
and he is sound on the unification issue.
But these factors can be just as much
defects as assets. Ma has, for example, only run
for office in Taipei city. Taipei, however, is a
totally unrepresentative polity, having as it does
a disproportionately large number of mainlanders -
perhaps 30%, compared with 15% for Taiwan as a
whole - and middle-class nouveau riche
Taiwanese who vote KMT because they see the
governing DPP as hotheaded ideologues who are bad
for business. Ma is popular but at the electoral
level conventional wisdom says that Ma "cannot
cross the Chuoshiu river", the traditional
boundary between northern and southern Taiwan. In
the south his mainlander background is a handicap,
and it has been widely accepted even in the KMT
itself that a mainlander will never be able to win
a presidential election - at least not while the
current ethnic dislikes prevail.
Ma's
unification stance might be a problem, though
nobody can realistically accuse him of intending
to "sell out Taiwan", ie do a deal with Beijing
and impose it on the Taiwanese without seeking
democratic endorsement. But a greater difficulty
for Ma might well be his honesty.
The KMT
has a well-deserved reputation for corruption. Ma,
on the other hand, has a well-known dislike of it;
in fact he even lost his job as minister of
justice in the mid-1990s because of his zeal in
prosecuting corrupt politicians who were useful to
the president of the day, Lee Teng-hui. A Ma
chairmanship could be somewhat uncomfortable for
some KMT heavyweights, closing hitherto lucrative
channels of self-enrichment.
This might
explain why, despite Ma's ethnic and family
background and political viability, his candidacy
has been unusually vigorously criticized by
powerful members of the party's old guard. Ma's
jumping the gun on announcing his candidacy is
also seen by the old guard as showing a lack of
respect for party hierarchy and procedure. Ma's
new broom might, they think, sweep uncomfortably
clean.
Wang on the other hand is just what
old guard should detest. He is after all a
Taiwanese, and is quite noticeably far more at
ease speaking the Taiwanese dialect than formal
Mandarin. He is an opportunist of quite dazzling
shamelessness, trimming his sails to whatever wind
is blowing, currying favor with everyone, enmity
with no one. It is almost impossible to know what
he stands for - apart from the greater glory of
Wang Jin-pyng - since he has, at times, supported
quite contradictory positions depending on who was
the party leader to whom he was trying to toady at
the time. In the days of the Taiwan nationalist
Lee Teng-hui, Wang was a Taiwanese nationalist.
Under Lien, a more traditional supporter of a
Greater Chinese nationalism, Wang has become the
soul of unificationist orthodoxy. He is the Vicar
of Bray of Taiwanese politics.
That the
very Taiwanese Wang should be the favorite of the
old guard over flesh-of-their-flesh Ma is one of
the great ironies of the current situation. But
Wang, who has been a most efficient bagman for
Lien Chan when such was needed, is seen as someone
who is at least as electorally viable as Ma and
who is unlikely to shake the party up in any
unpleasant way.
Whether this is true or
not it is almost impossible to guess. Wang has for
so long been a cipher for his leader that what he
himself would do should he become leader himself
is anyone's guess. What is known about Wang is
that he is a consummate deal-maker. To get
anything through Taiwan's gridlocked legislature
needs a huge amount of negotiation, and the
position of Speaker is one that only an expert
deal-maker could fill effectively. It is to Wang's
credit that even legislators from the DPP give him
high marks for his stewardship.
Currently
the DPP government is at a great disadvantage from
its lack of a majority in the legislature. As a
result it has been courting the KMT's smaller
ally, the People First Party, even though the two
parties are, on such issues as Taiwan's identity
and relations with China, at opposite ends of the
political spectrum. Actually the DPP would rather
do business with the KMT, but Lien's antipathy to
President Chen Shui-bian is so great that there
can be no party-to-party cooperation during the
remainder of his tenure.
Whoever becomes
chairman when Lien goes in August is going to have
more reasons than Lien to negotiate seriously with
the government. But whereas Ma would almost
certainly keep his party aloof from ideas of
joining a coalition, Wang would probably seize the
opportunity.
Of course this depends on a
realistic offer of a coalition being made. There
has been a lot of talk from the DPP of the
possibility, but in the end all they would offer
the KMT for its support in the legislature was the
sole - derisory - position of vice premier. Should
a serious offer of the vice premiership, along
with some of the more important ministries, be
made to Wang in September, there would be a strong
chance that the current gridlock could be broken.
Ma is unlikely to do this because as mayor
of Taipei he is entitled to attend cabinet
meetings where he has, over the past four years,
as a result of ideological differences, developed
a serious animosity to the DPP government's team.
He is, however, principled enough to put his party
behind measures that he deems sensible for Taiwan,
unlike Lien, who has opposed the Chen government
on everything, for the most part out of sheer
wounded self-esteem.
Some progress, then,
is likely after Lien's departure. But how much and
what kind is hard to say. Ma will shake up the KMT
but play hard to get for the government. Wang will
probably not reform the party but will be more
amenable to a deal with the DPP. The question is
which of these two the KMT membership itself will
prefer. Right now the race is too close to call
and the finish line - the election in May - too
far away.
Laurence Eyton is
deputy editor-in-chief of the Taipei Times. He has
worked in Taiwan for 18 years.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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