TAIPEI - Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang (KMT)
party has struggled to find a response to a stream
of open letters to President Ma Ying-jeou by a
group of Western academics, lobbyists and
diplomats that take aim at "the erosion of justice
and democracy" under Ma's rule [1].
The
letters from a group representing the United
States, Canada, Europe and Australia are arriving
thick and fast in the run-up to the island's
presidential and legislature elections in 2012.
While the KMT is having a hard time taking the
missives lightly, the constant attacks from
overseas are an unexpected boon for the opposition
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Ranging from a former chairman of the US
de facto embassy in
Taipei to vociferous
advocates for Taiwanese independence based in the
West - between them the group forms an academic
elite of research on East Asian affairs.
The group of over 30 formed soon after Ma
took office in 2008 and quickly began submitting
letters to Taiwanese newspapers, addressing Ma or
his cabinet. Flicking through the writings, it's
clear that the signatories, who categorize
themselves as "keen observers of political
developments in Taiwan", are claiming serious
deficits.
The latest letter alleges that
since Ma has been in power, virtually every
Taiwanese politician and former government
official prosecuted for corruption has belonged to
the opposition. It further alleges that the
Prosecutors Office has regularly leaked
detrimental information to the press, making fair
trials impossible in the first place.
Earlier this year, they protested charges
against 17 former DPP officials for having failed
to return thousands of documents during the
handover of power in 2008 from the former DPP
administration to the KMT.
The timing of
the charges was suspicious to the foreign group.
They were launched three years after the actual
transition period and only one day before Su
Tseng-chang - the most prominent DPP heavyweight
in the prosecutors' crosshairs - declared his
candidacy in the party's presidential primary.
The most recent letter to Ma Ying-jeou
came on August 1. While the authors again decry
the timing of an indictment against a member of
the opposition, this time the pattern had been
stretched to a startling degree.
Some 16
years after former president Lee Teng-hui, often
referred to as "the father of Taiwan's democracy",
allegedly siphoned US$7.8 million from secret
diplomatic funds, prosecutors have decided to
press charges. Making the judiciary seem even more
a tool of the KMT, key evidence cited by the
prosecutors had already been dismissed by the
courts in 2006.
The 88-year-old Lee, as
one of Ma's most vocal critics, had just begun
openly supporting DPP opposition leader Tsai
Ing-wen's bid for the 2012 presidential election.
Some of the non-Taiwanese observers of
Taiwanese politics involved in the letters told
Asia Times Online they believed the correspondence
was having the desired effect.
"The fact
that the Ma administration has been trying to
almost immediately respond in some form or other
lets us know that they are conscious of them and
concerned about criticism," said Jerome Keating, a
Taiwan-based political commentator and signatory
of each of the open letters in question. "All of
the earlier ones got an immediate response from
the Ministry of Justice and later from Ma's team."
Keating then explained how the open
letters came about. According to a fierce critic
of the KMT who labels Ma a "sneaky dictator type",
the majority of the signatories are members of a
special forum on Taiwan who moderate and discuss
various issues relating to Taiwan, such as
democracy and human rights.
"When an issue
arises, it is discussed; one person makes the
first draft, and then all contribute as they see
fit. Wording is discussed as well," Keating said,
adding that "though direct links for such are
difficult to present, some of the signatories have
been targeted in a form of reprisal by Ma's
forces."
After the open letter on the
"missing documents" was published by the
Chinese-language, staunchly pro-DPP Liberty Times
and subsequently by its English-language spin-off
the Taipei Times, the KMT reacted in a somewhat
awkward manner. KMT lawmakers appeared on TV talk
shows and questioned whether the signatories were
fully aware of the contents of the letter.
The lawmakers suggested that the letter
was originally written in Chinese, and that the
Anglophone foreigners simply signed something they
couldn't read. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs
went so far as to approach each of the signatories
to check if they had initiated the petition
themselves or just added their names to it, a
process that likely prompted Keating to speak of
difficult-to-prove reprisals.
The pro-KMT,
English-language China Post in an editorial put
forward another explanation for what it perceived
as undue outside interference. In a piece titled
"Open letter is political ploy on behalf of Su
Tseng-chang", the newspaper noted that in the
letter the 2012 presidential election was referred
to in the plural tense - presidential elections -
while primary became primaries and candidate
became candidates. To the newspaper, this proved
that Su - possibly because of poor written English
- had made the foreign group submit a letter he
had penned himself. The alleged motive was
defeating his own rivals within the DPP.
Whatever theory was correct, if any, in an
intriguing twist, the "missing document case"
appears to have been brushed under the carpet by
the government. Nothing has been heard of it
since, indicating that the Ma administration
feared that by contesting the open letters'
contents or the authors' credibility, it would end
up resembling Don Quixote fighting windmills.
Presumably, it was similar apprehensions that made
the government refrain from vociferously
protesting the recent letter that defended Lee
Teng-hui.
Indeed, there are other signs
that the Taiwanese government ponders a good deal
about the impression it makes on a foreign
audience. In early May, US representative Dana
Rohrabacher sent an open letter to Ma, wanting to
know why Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's most
significant and largely state-owned telecom
company, had terminated satellite services for the
pro-democracy, pro-Falungong channel New Tang
Dynasty (NTD).
Rohrabacher complained that
as the NTD relied on Chunghwa Telecom for
broadcast services in China, democratic Taiwan
ought to enable NTD to break the Chinese blockade
on free information, even suggesting that Chunghwa
terminated the contract under the orders of the Ma
administration. After the considerable
international uproar over Rohrabacher's letter to
Ma, against all odds, the broadcasting license was
renewed.
Taiwanese observers, too, are in
agreement that the foreign interference does make
a difference - however, only under certain
conditions. "No matter whether written by
foreigners or locals, in terms of political
impact, timing is key," said Huang Hua-hsi, a
Taiwanese legislative aide. "In 2006 [two years
before presidential election] when former
president Chen Shui-bian was caught in the state
affairs funds crisis, Taiwan's most prestigious
scholars asked him to step down. But of course,
Chen didn't step down," Huang recalled.
"But when last year right in the run-up to
the important municipality elections, writer Chang
Hsiao-feng wrote an open letter titled 'Mr
President, can I have two lungs?', protesting the
construction of a national biotech park, the Ma
administration gave in right away." Huang
furthermore argued that as the foreign groups'
allegations largely echoed those made by the DPP,
the pressure on the KMT had been multiplied.
"Undeniably, these letters do have a strong
political impact," Huang concluded.
Tsai
Ming-Yen, professor at and chairman of the
Graduate Institute for International Politics at
National Chung Hsing University, agrees. "This
kind of open letter puts a certain degree of
pressure on the KMT. After all, being criticized
by foreigners for meddling with the judiciary or
human-rights issues hardly paints the Ma
administration in a glorious light," Tsai said.
He added that the DPP naturally welcomed
this kind of foreign reaction and supported and
then gave an assessment as to how this kind of
support influenced public opinion, perhaps to be
felt on voting day. "Ordinary people might see the
issue a bit simpler than us. They think the
government must have done something wrong.
Because, otherwise foreigners wouldn't bother
criticizing Taiwan."
Note 1. Signatories of open letters to Ma Ying-jeou
include: Thomas Bartlett, honorary research
associate, history program, La Trobe University,
Melbourne; Coen Blaauw, Formosan Association for
Public Affairs, Washington; Jean Pierre Cabestan,
professor and head, Department of Government and
International Studies, Hong Kong Baptist
University; Gordon Chang, author; Wen-yen Chen,
professor emeritus, University of the District of
Columbia, and former president, North American
Taiwanese Professors' Association; Stephane
Corcuff, associate professor of political science,
China and Taiwan studies, University of Lyon;
Michael Danielsen, chairman, Taiwan Corner,
Copenhagen, Denmark; June Teufel Dreyer, professor
of political science, University of Miami; Norman
Getsinger, US foreign service (retired), The
George Washington University graduate program;
Terri Giles, executive director, Formosa
Foundation, Los Angeles; Stephen Halsey, assistant
professor of history, University of Miami; Mark
Harrison, senior lecturer, head of the Chinese
School of Asian Languages and Studies, University
of Tasmania.
Michael Rand Hoare, emeritus
reader at the University of London; Christopher
Hughes, professor of international relations,
London School of Economics and Political Science;
Thomas Hughes, former chief of staff to late US
senator Claiborne Pell, Washington; Bruce Jacobs,
professor of Asian-languages and studies, Monash
University, Melbourne; Richard Kagan, author and
professor emeritus of history, Hamline University;
Jerome Keating, author and associate professor,
National Taipei University (retired); David
Kilgour, former member of the Canadian parliament
and secretary of state for Asia-Pacific; Andre
Laliberte, professor, School of Political Studies,
University of Ottawa; Perry Link, professor
emeritus of East Asian Studies, Princeton
University.
Daniel Lynch, associate
professor, School of International Relations,
University of Southern California; Victor Mair,
professor of Chinese language and literature,
University of Pennsylvania; The Very Reverend
Bruce McLeod, former president, Canadian Council
of Churches, and former moderator, the United
Church of Canada; Donald Rodgers, associate
professor of political science, Austin College;
Terence Russell, associate professor of Chinese
language and literature, University of Manitoba;
Michael Scanlon, associate professor (retired),
Shih Chien University; Christian Schafferer,
associate professor, Department of International
Trade, Overseas Chinese Institute, chair of the
Austrian Association of East Asian Studies,
editor: Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia;
David Schak, adjunct professor of international
business and Asian studies, Griffith University;
Michael Stainton, York Center for Asia Research,
Toronto.
Peter Tague, professor of law,
Georgetown University; Ross Terrill, Fairbank
Center, Harvard University, and author; Reverend
Milo Thornberry, author; John Tkacik Jr, US
foreign service (retired) and independent
commentator, Washington; Arthur Waldron, lauder
professor of international relations, University
of Pennsylvania; Gerrit van der Wees, editor of
Taiwan Communique, Washington; Josef Weidenholzer,
Chair, Institute of Social and Societal Policy,
Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria;
Michael Yahuda, professor emeritus, the London
School of Economics, and visiting scholar, George
Washington University; Stephen Yates, president of
DC International Advisory and former deputy
assistant to the vice president for National
Security Affairs
Jens Kastner is
a Taipei-based journalist.
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