Asia Times: The shark's return could bloody Taiwan's waters


	July 28, 2001	atimes.com

China

The shark's return could bloody Taiwan's waters
By Laurence Eyton

TAIPEI - Tuesday in Taiwan saw the formal announcement that a new political party, backed by former president Lee Teng-hui and under the day-to-day leadership of Huang Chu-wen, a former minister of the interior and Lee loyalist, is to formally register its establishment on Monday, July 31.

The party brings Lee Teng-hui - loved by many Taiwanese, dubbed "whore of the millennia" by China for his separatist views - back into a political scene he dominates like a shark among minnows.

The new party, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) is the direct result of the change in direction of the Kuomintang (KMT), of which Lee used to be chairman until a disastrous performance by the party's candidate, Lien Chan, in last year's presidential election led to Lee's ouster. Lien, now himself KMT chairman, could only finish third, despite the advantages of incumbency, vastly superior party organization and cavernously deep pockets.

Street disturbances outside the party's Taipei headquarters led to Lee stepping down from the chairmanship over an election result he had in no way shaped. Lien's team had deliberately cut Lee out of the campaign in favor of a man repudiated by the electorate largely because his campaign turned its back on the very elements that had made Lee so successful - and so hated by China - four years before, namely a strident opposition to deal-making with China and a stressing of Taiwan's sovereignty.

Lee might have left the political scene into an embittered retirement - he is after all 78 - were it not for the radical turnaround of the KMT's ideological stance in the past year.

In the 12 years Lee was at the KMT's helm, he completely reoriented the party. The one he took over in 1988 identified with the aspirations of a united (though non-communist) "greater China", of which Taiwan was but a convenient strategic base. Under Lee, the KMT became a Taiwanese party dedicated to strengthening Taiwan's independent sovereignty and international position, and stressing the primacy of the native Taiwanese as the determiners of their own destiny - rather than the clique of mainland exiles which had run Taiwan for the 40 years following Chiang Kai-shek's flight from China - through democratic elections. The slogan "Taiwan First" represented the essence of Lee's ruling ideology.

Lee's abandonment of the cause of "greater China" nationalism resulted in two major defections from his party, one of party officials and lawmakers in 1993, who went on to form the New Party, and that of James Soong in 1999, who fought the presidential election as an independent and went on to found the People First Party a year ago, to which some 18 KMT legislators immediately decamped.

In the year since Lien took over, Lee's legacy has been repudiated. Ultra-conservative mainlanders who Lee had forced out of the party have been welcomed back, the party has organized seminars on the thinking of it founder, Dr Sun Yat-sen and a whole iconography, stressing the party's place in the history of Chinese nationalism, has been reinvented.

Particularly telling is Lien Chan's use, when speaking of the party, of its proper name, the "Chinese Kuomintang", a term which, under Lee, had long been abandoned. More significant, though, is that the KMT has become a far more active advocate of the idea of reunification with China; an ideological about-face which has allowed it to make common cause with the New Party and the People First Party, all reunificationist in outlook.

This "opposition alliance" has led to major problems. Between them the parties control two-thirds of the seats in the legislature. The result has been gridlock, with the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in government finding important policy blocked by an antagonistic legislature. Whether this gridlock was inevitable will probably be debated for years. While the DPP, after its election victory, tried to reach out to the KMT by appointing Tang Fei, a KMT stalwart, as the government's first premier, its insistence on implementing some of the more radical parts of its agenda showed a lack of realism about handling its weakness in the legislature in an intelligent way, for instance, by trying to negotiate with the opposition to find issues on which they could agree and pass the necessary legislation.

With only 39 percent of the vote in the presidential election and only a third of the seats in the legislature, the DPP, on coming to power, lacked a mandate to impose its own agenda, but showed no understanding of what this meant. On the other hand, the KMT was simply too bitter and shocked at finding itself out of office for the first time in 50 years that perhaps it just could not be worked with. It was, and is, in a state of denial - "sore loser" is a jibe frequently used against it - and sometimes seems to have only a tenuous grasp on reality.

For example, in the wake of Lee's ouster, Lien was elected party chairman by more than 90 percent of party members, despite the fact that nearly eight out of 10 voters in the 2000 election voted against him.

Ostensibly, it is to eradicate this gridlock that the TSU has been formed. The DPP is unlikely to capture a majority of seats in the December elections; it would need at least 113 in the 225-seat house, but nobody anticipates it winning more than 85. If the TSU, which is quite open about making common cause with the DPP, could win the 35 seats it is aiming for, the two parties could control the legislature and give the government the majority it needs.

One question that arises is why someone might vote for the TSU given that they know the TSU backs the DPP. Why not just vote for the DPP?

The answer is that the TSU wants to appeal to constituencies not enamored of the DPP in the past. The DPP's street-fighting past remains a turn-off for more conservative voters, even though it is now a decade past. Working-class voters are also often put off by the DPP's rather bourgeois complexion; the DPP is traditionally a party of Taiwanese gentry demanding the running of Taiwan by Taiwanese, an ideology of ethnic nationalism rather than the social democracy many foreign commentators mistake it for.

But most of all, the TSU seeks support from people who in the past voted KMT because they liked Lee and his principle of "Taiwan First". They thought the KMT was safe, the DPP too radical. They liked Lee's stance toward China, and were grateful for - and felt empowered by - the democratization he introduced.

How big this group is nobody knows. When Lee Teng-hui ran for the presidency in 1996, he won 54 percent of the vote for the KMT. Lien Chan, in 2000, won only 24 percent, but these figures are probably meaningless. In 1996, the DPP had a weak candidate who received little more than 20 percent of the vote. In 2000, they had a strong candidate who did twice as well. Soong, the KMT maverick, was also a far stronger candidate than either of the two KMT mavericks running in 1996, but then again, almost certainly some of Lien Chan's 24 percent voted for him because he was the KMT candidate endorsed - unenthusiastically - by Lee.

These complexities have led to a situation where, as Albert Goldman said of Hollywood "nobody knows anything". How much support will the TSU have and where does it come from? Nobody knows - which means the TSU founders' predictions of 35 legislative seats in December could be nothing more than wishful thinking. Polling in Taiwan is entirely corrupt - the questions are usually loaded to produce certain desirable answers - so polls reveal nothing.

This lack of information has produced some curious reactions. Most concerned are some elements of the DPP, the party the TSU is supposed to be helping. They look back to 1996 where Lee took a third of the votes of the DPP's core support - which traditionally runs at about 30 percent of the population - and fear that such "cannibalization" might happen again.

This fear is not unjustified since the TSU advocates the "state-to-state" interpretation of relations with China that Lee espoused in 1999 and compared with which, the DPP, for all its pro-independence background, has conducted a far less confrontational approach to China. Far from the TSU capturing the middle of the road, it might, therefore, have a strong appeal to the DPP's more extreme fringe.

Another problem for the DPP is that the party is moving toward a lifting of the ban on direct transportation and commercial links and restrictions on investment with China that is widely seen as inevitable within the next year. Yet part of the TSU's platform revealed on Tuesday is that these pet policies of Lee Teng-hui's should stay.

Least worried is the People First Party, even though a large amount of its support comes from ethnic Taiwanese who like party leader James Soong's hands-on style. Yet it is precisely an appeal to ethnicity - combined with the political savvy lacking in the DPP - that is at the TSU's core.

Ironically, but not surprisingly, the party which is likely to suffer the most at the TSU's hands, the KMT, simply doesn't want to acknowledge its vulnerability. That Lien's reorientation away from Lee's highly popular policies would alienate some supporters was inevitable. That his particular embrace of the reunificationist cause, the party's willingness to enter into talks with China and the invitation to rejoin the party extended to the mainlander ousted by Lee in the mid-1990s would annoy ethnic Taiwanese in the party was also inevitable.

But the majority of KMT supporters - the overwhelming majority of those who voted for Lien in the presidential election for example - are ethnic Taiwanese, which means that Lien has alienated core support. In fact without this alienation, the TSU would never have been conceived. Yet there is no recognition that this is the case in the KMT. Instead the party debates Lee's expulsion for "disloyalty" even though this would be an unmitigated disaster for the party and an extraordinary boost for the TSU.

The KMT's bizarre strategy is the result of Lien, himself a Taiwanese, honestly believing that there is more greater-China nationalist sentiment among the Taiwanese than is generally believed. It is also because Lien has been pandering to the supporters of Soong and the PFP, seeing their defection last year as costing him the presidential election.

The problem for him now is that now Lien has to work within the "opposition alliance" framework - necessary to prevent the disastrous splitting of the anti-DPP vote - poaching Soong voters is no longer legitimate sport, limiting the KMT's options severely.

The TSU's foundation, however, introduces not only huge uncertainty into the legislative election's outcome but something far murkier, the issue of serious ethnic conflict. That is, perhaps, no fault of the TSU itself, but rather a natural outgrowth of the repression of ethnic Taiwanese in politics for 40 years by Chiang Kai-shek and his son.

The practice of what in Taiwan is called "ethnic apartheid" led to mainland Chinese enjoying stature and power out of all proportion to their numbers - they are about 15 percent of the population, yet they dominate the leadership of all political parties with the exception of the DPP, as well as the government bureaucracy, the armed forces and even the media.

Ethnic resentment has long been a fact of life in Taiwan. Mainlanders who consider themselves to have protected Taiwan from communism are bitter about the lack of gratitude shown by the Taiwanese. The Taiwanese, for their part, loath the mainlanders as a pampered colonial upper class, stealing their wealth and their jobs, denying them their civil rights and fiercely repressing their culture.

Open, ethnically based rebellion broke out in 1947 before the Chiang Kai-shek government fled China and was brutally suppressed. Ethnic tension has simmered ever since, controlled first by Chiang's brutal eternal security apparatus and later by the expedient of having Lee Teng-hui, a Taiwanese, lead the KMT, the party of the mainlanders, toward his "Taiwan First" goals. This did not prevent some defections, but it kept a lid on ethnic resentment.

But the December election cannot but help stoke ethnic tension. All three opposition parties are mainlander-dominated and supportive of trading some degree of sovereignty for a deal with China leading to eventual reunification.

Given that both the PFP and New Party are KMT offshoots, the opposition alliance is, as a whole, hugely vulnerable to the charge that now that mainlanders no longer can enjoy power in Taiwan through the KMT they want to sell the country to China. If this is a calumny, it might be a brutally effective tactic on the part of the Taiwanese-dominated DPP and the TSU. It makes the election a question of ethnic loyalty in which the majority Taiwanese will inevitable win hands down. But it also raise the specter of political violence, something that Taiwan has been free of throughout its democratic transition.

The DPP-TSU will find it hard to resist an election campaign resolved into the simplicities of "vote for Taiwan" vs "vote for China". "Taiwan for the Taiwanese" is another powerful slogan and it might even be what election is actually about. But it will be hard to campaign on such a theme and keep the Pandora's box of Taiwan's festering ethnic resentment closed.

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