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Taiwan's Ma proves an odd
winner
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Taiwan is still wondering what to
make of the result of the former-ruling Kuomintang
Party's first-ever serious - in that there was a
choice of candidates - democratic election for
party chairman. But as the result rolled in
Saturday, it looked as if there was hardly any
competition.
Ma Ying-jeou, mayor of Taipei
City as well as a party vice chairman, captured
375,056 votes, some 72%, against 143,268 for his
opponent Wang Jin-pyng, the legislative speaker
and another party vice chairman.
It looked
like a walkover for Ma. But while polls during the
campaign had always suggested that Ma would win,
the scale of his victory was unforeseen and for
many in senior party positions in the party it was
undesirable.
Ma was widely touted by the
media as the favorite, but he was certainly a very
odd favorite. When the vote took place, three
quarters of the party's legislators, many
high-level party officials such as central
executive committee head Chang Che-shen and more
than 100 retired generals - the KMT is
traditionally strong in the military - had thrown
their support behind Wang. The party ruled Taiwan,
often brutally, for 55 years until losing power in
2000.
Outgoing chairman Lien Chan, while
keeping aloof from the campaign, was widely
believed to support Wang. So if Ma was the
favorite, he was also a heavily handicapped one.
Even Ma's father, an elderly party apparatchik,
had earlier in the campaign tried to discourage
his son from running.
Given that the big
guns of the party had turned against him, why did
Ma win? Paradoxically, he was successful both
because he appealed to the instincts of elderly
ultra-conservatives within the party and also
represented the best chance for party reform. The
respective weights attaching to each of these
components of his victory are still being debated,
as is the degree to which he will cater to these
very different constituencies.
An
uphill struggle
Ma's candidacy was beset
with problems from the moment he announced in
mid-February that he would run. The first problem
was that Lien Chan had not ruled, then ruled out,
seeking another term as chairman. Ma's declaration
that he would run in the election come what may
was regarded in the KMT - where loyalty to the
leadership has always been regarded as far more
important than mere ability - as lese
majeste. The more canny Wang always said that
he would run once Lien had confirmed he would not
seek another term.
In the end Lien, who
was both known to want to run again and had a
highly vocal claque urging him to do so, never
made such an announcement, but merely waited for
the deadline to register his candidacy to pass.
Ma's next problem was a quite blatant attempt to
gerrymander the vote. The KMT boasts about 1.1
million members, but only about 300,000 are fully
paid-up in their annual dues. (Since many of these
are army veterans or party workers, they pay
either no dues or a reduced rate.) Many of the
others are only nominal members, often as a result
of working for an organization - often a state-run
enterprise - in which, before the Democratic
Progressive Party took power in 2000, KMT party
membership was compulsory.
Throughout the
spring the party was torn by a bitter debate about
who should be allowed to vote in the election. Ma
said that it was obvious that only members "in
good standing" (fully paid-up) should have the
right to vote. Wang claimed that party rules let
anybody with a correctly issued membership card
vote.
What made the argument bitter was
that the vast majority of the 300,000 members in
good standing were expected to vote for Ma, since
he is a mainlander, his father being one of those
who followed Chiang Kai-shek into exile in Taiwan
in 1949. Most of the 300,000 were old,
conservative and mainlanders themselves. They
would never trust a native Taiwanese like Wang
with the KMT chairmanship, particularly after the
previous Taiwanese chairman, Lee Teng-hui, turned
out to be an apostate toward everything the KMT
holds dear - the "sacred goal" of the unification
of China and the party's mainland heritage under
Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek.
On the
other hand, many of the remaining members - those
not "in good standing" - were Taiwanese and
lukewarm at best to the KMT's Chinese nationalism,
though remaining in the KMT because for many years
it simply made opportunistic sense. Restricting
the franchise would therefore give the election to
Ma. Opening it up was thought at the time to be
giving it to Wang.
Eventually it was
decided to open up the franchise. Ma grudgingly
conceded, largely because his own private polling
showed that his standing among nominal members was
not as bad as was initially thought.
There
then followed a bitter campaign in which, as usual
in Taiwan, ethnicity played a malign role. This
was because of the likelihood that the next
chairman of the KMT was likely also to be its
candidate for the 2008 presidential election.
This put a curious spin on campaigning
because Ma is without doubt the most popular KMT
politician, which once again should have made him
a shoo-in for chairman. But it is also received
wisdom among the Taiwan political class that a
mainlander could never win election as Taiwan's
president. Taiwanese, the theory goes, have been
kicked around by mainlanders enough during the
days of the KMT's dictatorship and will not
willingly elect another mainlander to be head of
state - despite that in 2000 they almost did
exactly that.
The reformer vs (dirty)
business as usual
If Ma's ethnicity was a
dubious advantage, so was Wang's. As a mainlander,
Ma could rely on the votes of the vast majority of
the 300,000 dues-payers. Wang had to cast his net
wide among the nominal members, while also trying
to chip away at the ethnic solidarity vote by
contrasting the importance of this with the virtue
of party loyalty.
Wang's pitch was that he
had always been a loyal party man and that he
intended to leave the party much as it was - in
contrast to Ma who had been talking of reform as
much needed. This was a rather subtle appeal to
the worst qualities associated with the KMT.
Wang certainly was a KMT loyalist, having
been the bagman in chief to both Lien and Lee,
despite their leaderships being ideologically
diametrically opposed.
The business of the
KMT has always been about money, making it and
buying favors or support with it, and Wang has
been pre-eminent in this task. He was, for
example, a key figure, following Lien's defeat in
the legislative election last year, in handing out
largesse within the party to buy off a challenge
to Lien's leadership. Wang's pitch, therefore,
that under him the party would not face any big
changes, was basically a not-so-covert message to
acquisitive local party factions, most of whose
members are Taiwanese, that nothing would be done
to turn off the cash flow that oils the party
machine and fills their pockets.
Ma, on
the other hand, not only stood as a reformer but
also had a history of opposition to corruption,
which lost him his job as justice minister 10
years ago when he stepped on too many powerful
toes.
The final problem for Ma to contend
with was the opposition of James Soong, the leader
of the People First Party. The PFP is the junior
partner in the "pan blue" opposition alliance (so
called after the traditional color of Chinese
nationalism). Given that the PFP broke away only
four years ago from the KMT, many PFP supporters
are also KMT members. Soong's endorsement should,
therefore, carry some force.
Soong was the
vice-presidential candidate with Lien on the
losing ticket in 2004 and might have hoped to be
chosen as the pan-blue presidential candidate in
2008. A Ma victory would make this impossible as
it would be seen that the torch had passed to a
younger generation. Ma is probably as strong a
candidate as Soong, and the two men dislike each
other. Ma's victory put the ultimate prize
permanently out of his reach.
The path
ahead
That Ma won, and did so handsomely,
raises as many questions as it answers. Ma was the
obvious candidate for ultra-conservative rank and
file mainlanders. He was also the obvious
candidate for any KMT members seeking reform in
the party. But he was elected in spite of pressure
from the party hierarchy to vote for Wang. This
means two things, first that there is a gulf
between the party's rank and file and its
functionaries. And secondly, Ma is taking over a
party organization in which he has little support.
How he will bridge this divide has yet to
be seen - he will not actually become party
chairman until a congress next month. This week he
seems to favor wooing senior party officials, most
of them Lien appointees, by making Lien an
"honorary party chairman", though the role of this
new position has yet to be defined.
He has
also soft-peddled on his previously expressed
intention to rid the KMT of its illegally acquired
wealth. He has this week backed the liquidation of
the KMT's huge portfolio of assets, many of which
were obtained through the illegal transfer of
state property to the party - without
consideration of the legality of their
acquisition.
If Ma ran as a reformist
candidate, he certainly does not now look like a
reformer. It is, however, early days. Should the
party organization prove too recalcitrant, it will
be interesting to see if he can use his huge rank
and file support to overrule it.
Apart
from the task of bending the party machine to his
will, is the wider question of the impact he will
make on Taiwan politics as a whole. The two
greatest questions are whether he will end the
KMT's boycott of the legislature and what policy
toward China he will pursue.
For the past
five years, Taiwan's government has been almost
paralyzed because the DPP hold the executive,
while the pan-blues control the legislature. Under
Lien, the KMT has simply blocked almost all
legislation devised by the DPP, whether it was
controversial or not, whether it was needed or
not. Such a policy has done great damage to
Taiwan, to which Lien in a five-year long sulk
over losing the 2000 election seems oblivious.
It is hoped that Ma, who prides himself on
his sense of civic responsibility, might adopt a
more flexible approach. But given that the
defeated Wang will still be managing the KMT's
legislative agenda, imposing his will might be
difficult.
Finally there is the question
of Ma's policy toward China. Lien has used China,
especially China's economy, as a stick to beat the
DPP with, discounting or ignoring China's manifest
shortcomings in political freedoms, human rights
and the rule of law. Ma on the other hand has
taken a far more robust stance on the issue of
democracy and human rights.
He has also
repeatedly said that the "one country, two
systems" formula, previously applied to Hong Kong
and Macau and the only arrangement for unification
that China seems prepared to consider, is out of
the question for the Taiwanese - thereby earning
himself Beijing's considerable displeasure. Ma
likes the idea of unification, but not with China
under its present management.
In this
respect, given that Ma will almost certainly be
the KMT's presidential candidate in 2008 and that
he stands a good chance of winning the election,
some of the less extreme Taiwan independence
advocates are almost looking forward to this. They
argue that just as only anti-communist former
American president Richard Nixon could open the US
door to China in the mid-1970s, therefore perhaps
only a mainlander unificationist can express in a
way that Beijing has to listen to the reasons why
more than 80% of Taiwanese do not support
unification, either now or in the future.
Laurence Eyton is the deputy
editor in chief of the Taipei Times newspaper and
a columnist for the Chinese-language Taiwan Daily.
He's lived and worked in Taiwan for 18 years.
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