Asia Times: Taiwan reshuffle draws a better hand


	January 26, 2002	atimes.com

China

Taiwan reshuffle draws a better hand
By Laurence Eyton

TAIPEI - An old saying says "third time lucky". Certainly, Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian must hope so. Chen appointed his third cabinet since he took office in May 2000 this week, and his picks for top jobs show a government that might, after a shaky start, at last have found its feet.

One of the major contributing factors to the president's new confidence has to be the results of legislative elections last December in which his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took the largest number of seats, displacing the once-mighty Kuomintang (KMT).

The DPP's victory was not absolute, however. The party can only rely on its own 88 seats in the legislature and the Taiwan Solidarity Union's 13. This gives it 101 out of 225 seats. The opposition, composed of the KMT, the People First Party and the New Party, thinks, at least, that it can rely on some 117 seats - all three parties plus some independents.

Its numerical advantage is cut very fine in the new legislature - in the last one it had 138 seats - which is why, perhaps, the opposition parties, especially the KMT, whose 50-year rule in Taiwan tended to give it almost a monopoly of able administrative talent, have been determined to keep their members out of the cabinet.

The government, for its part, has learned a number of lessons from its past experience, and these are showing themselves in some of the cabinet choices.

First, it has learned that there is little point in trying to negotiate with the opposition. Chen's first cabinet included a KMT premier and several other party rankers, some of whom were forced on him by the preferences, it is believed in Taipei, of the United States, which was aghast that Chen with his pro-Taiwan independence background had actually won the presidential election.

Chen discovered that the ideological gap between the KMT and himself was simply too great. His first premier, Tang Fei, an ex-general and KMT member, did his best to accommodate himself to the DPP's policies, but in the end they were just too antipathetic, especially the DPP's zeal to cancel Taiwan's Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, a US$11 billion boondoggle passed by the KMT for the sake of its central committee members' construction interests.

Tang resigned in September 2000, and was replaced as premier by Chang Chun-hsiung. Chang was one of the most senior DPP legislators and it was thought that since the government's problem was largely with getting its policy past a determinedly obstructionist legislature, Chang was the man to facilitate this.

Chang proved, however, not only of little use in negotiating smoother relations with the legislature, but even failed really to work in tandem with the president. Chang and Chen were a double act always slightly out of step.

The two's greatest blunder - the cancellation of construction of the nuclear plant - was typical of this. Chang announced the move against a key KMT project less than an hour after Chen had completed discussions with KMT leader Lien Chan aimed at achieving some sort of rapprochement between the two.

But the president's last bold action before Chang resigned was almost as ill-timed. Meeting with a pro-Taiwan independence group from the United States on the group's 20th birthday, Chen announced as "a birthday gift" that he was from now on going to put the word "Taiwan" on Taiwan's passports, while still retaining the official "Republic of China" name.

However practical Chen's move might have been, it was inflammatory to the pro-unification opposition to announce the change at such a setting. It was also a usurpation of the power of the premier. The decision was the foreign ministry's to suggest and Chang's to approve; it was not a presidential prerogative.

Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that it was not disagreement between Chen and Chang that led to the cabinet reshuffle. The resignation of the cabinet has been traditional prior to a newly-elected legislature taking office - though it has no longer been mandated by the constitution since 1997 - and it was for that reason that the cabinet resigned.

If Chang's cabinet seems less of a compromise than Tang's, then in the new cabinet the DPP at last seems to have found confidence in its own ability to find able administrators. The new premier is Yu Shyi-kun, formally the secretary-general to the presidential office - something like the president's chief of staff. This makes him perhaps the ultimate insider, privy to the most obscure machinations of the president and well able to avoid the lack of coordination and bad timing that was such an obvious problem with his predecessor.

Yu also has a reputation for integrity remarkable for DPP officials and unheard of among his KMT counterparts. In 2000, a bungled rescue by the emergency services of some workers stranded in a river, which resulted in four deaths, led to Yu's resignation as vice premier as one of his responsibilities was to head a committee on emergency rescue facilities. What made Yu's resignation a matter of honor rather then responsibility was that he had led the committee for less than a week prior to the tragedy.

Yu was later given a place in the presidential office, and there he might have stayed for the rest of Chen's presidency. But his zeal and efficiency in organizing the key political event of last year - outside the election - the National Economic Development Conference, a gabfest of politicians, academics and businesspeople designed to come up with a solution to Taiwan's economic woes - showed that he had administrative talent at a national level.

His major achievement was to convince the obstructionist opposition parties that it was in their interests to attend and participate constructively in the conference - with an implied but unspoken threat that if they refused than the economy's malaise could be laid squarely at their door.

In his work on the conference, Yu proved that he was well liked, even among the opposition, and that he had persuasive power at a cross-party level. Along with his closeness to the ear of the president, this made him an ideal choice for the new premier.

The most interesting picks in the new cabinet are, given the parlous state of Taiwan's economy, the new ministers of economic affairs and finance.

The economics portfolio has gone to a highly controversial pick, Christine Tsung, the former CEO of China Airlines. Tsung has managed the former flag carrier for 18 months, during which she achieved a remarkable reversal of fortune for the airline, the reputation of which has been severely damaged by several high profile crashes in the past decade.

Meanwhile, the finance portfolio went to the chairman of the International Commercial Bank of China, Lee Yung-san, who is also head of the Bankers Association.

Chen's idea is obviously to bring some private sector talent into the running of Taiwan's stuffy and unimaginative ministries. But whether Tsung and Lee are ideal for their new jobs is being vigorously debated.

Tsung's appointment to China Airlines was, after all, based not on her merits at running airlines, rather it was a political decision by the president.

Tsung was, during her 28 years of residency in the United States, one of President Chen Shui-bian's most ardent supporters, founding a supporters' club for him among the overseas Taiwanese in Southern California.

Previous to China Airlines, Tsung's experience includes a stint as a marketing manager with Columbia Pictures and an executive job with domestic appliance maker Electrolux and financial officer of the city government of Poway, San Diego.

What brought Tsung to China Airlines was the president's desire to wrest control of the company from the KMT, of which it had been a fiefdom ever since its founding.

Critics of the decision to appoint Tsung do not doubt her business acumen so much as they wonder how someone who has lived in the United States for 28 years can be expected to have the grasp of Taiwanese conditions and issues and, not least, its bureaucratic culture, to make a success of the job. The island's central economic concern is how to manage the industrial exodus to China, but this revolves around areas in which Tsung has little experience.

Lack of experience in key areas is a criticism also made of Lee. While he undoubtedly has a lot of experience in banking - which of course might prove invaluable in cleaning up Taiwan's bad loan mess - he is short on experience in the fields of public finance and taxation and has no previous experience as a government regulator.

Beyond the economic area, the new cabinet is packed with Chen Shui-bian loyalists, many of whom worked with him during his period as mayor of Taipei City between 1994 and 1998.

Certainly the new cabinet's closeness to Chen personally might make for a more unified team and remove the appearance of ramshackle lack of organization that has bedeviled Chang and Tang's ministries.

But there is also a sense that Chen has spent nearly two years in office relatively soft peddling, acutely aware of how unused not only Taiwanese but governments in Washington and Beijing were to the idea of a DPP government, and as a result surrounding himself with officials who were not on his ideological wavelength but were regarded as a safe - even if lackluster - pairs of hands.

The new cabinet has openly been termed a "fighting cabinet". It is made up of Chen ideological bedfellows, and, with the government's great weakness in the legislature mostly redressed, it is set to show the people of Taiwan what DPP government is really all about.

This is a formula that has worked at the local level in Taiwan. Now in the two year run-up to a presidential election in 2004, Chen and his party hope it might work again. What makes for tension, however, is that it didn't work for Chen in his reelection bid as Taipei City mayor in 1998. So it is not only a fighting cabinet, but a gambling one as well.

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