China's strange silence on Chen's
troubles By Augustine Tan
HONG KONG - In Beijing's eye, Taiwanese
President Chen Shui-bian is a troublemaker.
Naturally Beijing would take great pleasure in
seeing the embattled Chen suffer from corruption
scandals involving his family and himself.
However, so far mainland China's official
media have kept silent on this piece of "hot news"
and the follow-ups in Taiwan. Only some Internet
sites are allowed to dispatch tailored stories
selected from the Taiwanese and Hong Kong media.
The Taiwan Affairs Office under the State Council,
China's cabinet, declines to
comment on Chen's case,
repeatedly saying it is a "domestic affair".
It is apparent that Beijing is afraid that
reporting Chen's predicament in the mass media
could backfire. The public might raise questions
along the lines of "What can we do with official
corruption?" And if Taiwan's president could be
caught, "What about our own corrupt 'big fishes'?"
It is true that an anti-graft campaign
launched by Chinese President Hu Jintao now is
sweeping across the mainland with many officials
being netted, including the former Shanghai
Communist Party chief Chen Liangyu, who was also
on the 24-member politburo, China's very power
core. The campaign has won wide public support.
However, given the fact that past
anti-graft campaigns since the mid-1990s have
always been "in like a lion but out like a lamb",
only to enable official corruption to make a
comeback with more strength, the public is still
suspicious whether Hu's campaign will also have a
fine start but a poor finish.
Also,
Taiwan's media have played a key role in exposing
Chen's scandals, which may lead mainlanders to
wonder when China can have the same freedom of the
press in effect to supervise the behavior of party
and government officials.
Furthermore,
under Taiwan's multi-party politics,
anti-corruption becomes a focus of multi-party
struggle. In contrast, Hu's campaign is under the
tight control of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP), and he obviously does not want to see the
battle against the social evil become an
"unharmonious factor" to society.
In terms
of the amount of money involved, Chen is, indeed,
a tiny fish compared with corrupt officials of
lesser ranks on the mainland.
According to
Chang Wen-cheng of Taiwan's High Prosecutor's
Office, President Chen, his wife Wu Shu-chen and
three aides siphoned off about US$450,000 from the
public purse between 2002 and early this year.
By the corruption standards of the
mainland, this is chicken feed. China's chief
statistician, Qiu Xiaohua, who has just been
sacked and is still under investigation, is said
to have sent his mistress no less than $6.3
million in cash taken from the Shanghai Pension
Fund. How much he got for himself is anybody's
guess.
How much Shanghai party chief Chen
Liangyu pocketed in the massive looting of the
fund is also the subject of considerable
guesswork. The usual tag is "hundreds of millions"
out of the $1.6 billion that has gone missing.
Corruption on the mainland is simply
B-I-G. A former Shenyang mayor - small fry
compared with Taiwan's Chen Shui-bian - had no
less than $6 million in gold bars walled up inside
his house when party investigators came a-calling.
This year two Bank of China executives
were arrested for corruption involving nothing
less than $485 million.
This colossal
difference in the scale of corruption between
mainland officials and the petty thievery of the
Taiwanese leader and his wife partly accounts for
the deafening silence from Beijing on the island's
continuing political turmoil.
In normal
circumstances, Beijing's leaders might be expected
gleefully to trumpet the pitfalls of democracy and
publicly relish the predicament of their most
hated enemy. But except for a few websites, there
has been almost no mention of the upheavals in
Taiwan.
Just weeks ago, Taiwan was still
being held up as the example of what Chinese
people can achieve under democracy, right down to
massive peaceful protests without undermining the
system.
That, of course, put Beijing on
edge. Democracy, Western-style, is not its style.
But as long as Chen Shu-bian did not declare
independence, Beijing just had to tolerate it.
The lurking fear was that Chen might
attempt to declare independence as his second and
final term came to a close. This concern led to
last year's adoption of the Anti-Secession Law by
China's National People's Congress.
Since
then, this concern has receded. To his opponents
and, perhaps, to observers on the mainland, Chen
has put the independence issue on the back burner
to concentrate on some surreptitious looting
before leaving office.
His son-in-law Chao
Chien-ming has now been charged with insider
trading, while his wife Wu Shu-chen and three
aides have been indicted for embezzlement, forgery
and perjury relating to the $450,000 taken from a
government-run fund. Chen himself cannot be
prosecuted because of presidential immunity, but
he can be tried once he leaves office.
In
the wake of these scandals, unprecedented
demonstrations exploded across the island,
dividing districts and families, with a clear
majority behind the ailing Shih Ming-teh, founder
of Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as
well as his former mentor. Shih, who was
recently treated for cancer, is pushing for the
president's resignation. Also arrayed against Chen
are a segment of his party, all the opposition
groups led by the Kuomintang's chairman and Taipei
mayor, Ma Ying-jeou, and Chen's predecessor Lee
Teng-hui.
The campaign saw Shih leading a
motorcade from Taipei to all the major cities on
the island beginning September 29 and ending in
Taoyuan on October 6. Only about 20 buses were
involved, but supporters joined in their own
vehicles. The mammoth motorcade tied up traffic on
the island's expressways, especially as it
descended into the DPP strongholds of Kaohsiung
and Pingtung in the south.
Successive
polls have shown minority support for Chen,
undoubtedly accounting for the growing frustration
in Chen's camp. By all accounts, clashes between
opposing groups of demonstrators and between
activists and the police during the campaign were
instigated by Chen's supporters.
All sides
pledged to keep the demonstrations peaceful, but
skirmishes still broke out on several occasions.
Pushed to the edge, both sides could rely on
secret societies. This, plus the close links
between individual politicians and the police as
well as the intelligence organizations, made for a
potentially explosive situation.
This also
accounts for Beijing's silence. Rather than
relishing Chen's predicament, Beijing may be
worried that Taiwan will explode into
uncontrollable, islandwide violence, providing
Chen an opportunity for one last desperate throw
of the independence dice. Chen has given cause
for concern. In the midst of his travails he has
repeated his mantra that he wants Taiwan to join
the United Nations, under the name of "Taiwan"
instead of "Republic of China".
He has
also been more specific on what he wants done in a
revision of the constitution - remove the People's
Republic of China and Mongolia from the "sovereign
territory of the Republic of China".
This
prompted an immediate response from the US that it
took "very seriously" Chen's repeated commitments
not to permit the constitutional-reform process to
encompass sovereignty issues. Clearly the
Americans are also concerned that Chen's
desperation may take a nasty turn.
If
Beijing sees Chen's pronouncements as indications
of desperate acts to come, it is not saying
anything. It probably would not want to encourage
more conservative elements in both the CCP and the
military who regard civil unrest as valid reason
for armed intervention.
This bleak view is
not shared by everyone in Beijing. Some academics
seem to believe that Chen may eventually "bow out"
to the extent of remaining president in name for
the rest of this second term ending in May 2008
while effective power imigrates to Vice President
Annette Lu.
Behind-the-scene moves by
Premier Su Tseng-chang to end the turmoil are
believed to include this option, which is favored
by many in the pro-Chen faction of the DPP.
The final push against a reluctant Chen
may not come from the street demonstrators but
from a successful prosecution of the case against
his wife. Chen has promised to step down if that
happens. However, given the way he has twisted and
turned in the past, nothing is assured.
If
Chen hangs on in spite of a conviction against his
wife, he will be dealing a grievous blow to
democracy - and confirm Beijing's view that
democracy in Taiwan - and in Hong Kong - is being
pushed by self-serving politicians.
Augustine Tan is a freelance
journalist based in Hong Kong.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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