Asia Times: China


	June 29, 2002	atimes.com

China

Taiwan opposition shoots itself in the foot
By Laurence Eyton

TAIPEI - In Taiwan the confirmation by the legislature of members of the Council of Grand Justices, the Control Yuan - a government watchdog body - and the head of the Examination Yuan, the agency that runs the country's civil service, is seldom if ever controversial.

That is until this year, with the knife-edge balance of power between the two rival blocks in the legislature and the visceral loathing between the opposition parties and the Democratic Progressive Party-controlled government.

The votes took place on June 20-21 in extremely controversial circumstances that resulted in a physical attempt by party whips to stop legislators voting, the opposition's loss of its majority in the legislature, accusations of vote-buying and the overall impression, according to the media at any rate, that democracy as practiced in Taiwan is a shambles.

What was missed, however, in most Taiwanese coverage of the events was the political dimension of the appointments the president sought to make. The opposition, as a result, as well as shooting itself in the foot with its parliamentary tactics, has had a public relations disaster, appearing to justify the government's criticisms of it as blindly obstructionist, whatever the cost to the nation.

And yet there was far more at stake than a mere demonstration of opposition parliamentary muscle. But, as ever in Taiwan, the fight for confirmation of the presidential appointees was billed as a showdown at noon, some sort of gladiatorial combat in which everyone paid attention to the "form" of the opponents and nobody cared that there were genuine issues involved. For this the opposition only has itself to blame.

Taiwan's civil service is supposed to be politically neutral. In practice, for most of the past half-century, ascending the ranks of the civil service was as much dependent on one's status as a member of the then-ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party as it was on any administrative ability. Indeed the boundaries between the civil service and the KMT party organization were so hazy that officials would regularly and repeatedly hop between the two.

The end of martial law in the late 1980s and the coming of democracy in the '90s made for a slow disentangling of party and state, but many still believe that to obtain the favor of one's civil service superiors, a good KMT party record can go a long way.

Appointing a DPP ideologue to head this organization would obviously be a challenge to the KMT's interests and that is exactly what President Chen Shui-bian intended to do. His candidate, Yao Chia-wen, was leading dissident in the days of single-party rule and became one of the first chairmen of the DPP after its founding in the late 1980s. He has always been an outspoken advocate of Taiwan independence and as a presidential adviser in the past two years is credited with playing a leading role in this government's rejection of the so-called "1992 consensus" as a basis for reopening talks with China.

The KMT could have attacked Yao's appointment in a number of ways. It could have asserted that the 64-year-old Yao was a has-been, though given the KMT's own preference for septuagenarians that might have been difficult. It certainly could have pointed out that Yao is a veteran political activist with no administrative experience to speak of - except of his own notoriously fissiparous party. It might also have suggested that appointing Yao was simply the DPP president's putting a favorite political hack out to grass, hardly a fitting way in which to fill a position with overall responsibly for a staff of 800,000 and an enormous budget.

All of these arguments, especially the charge that Chen was treating the post as a sinecure for an old party comrade - though of course that is exactly how the KMT had used the position in the past - would have had more power than the argument the party did use against Yao, namely that his radical pro-independence stand made him too "political" a figure for the appointment.

This kind of fumbling, an uncanny capacity for choosing exactly the wrong issue to be focus on, has become a hallmark of the KMT under the leadership of Lien Chan over the last two years. Here it was a mistake simply because Taiwanese are not frightened by independence advocates anymore. That does not mean they are more enamored with pro-independence ideology. Rather they have seen that when independence loudmouths actually gain office they quickly quieten down as they adapt themselves to the realities of Taiwan's de facto autonomy.

The seriousness of this KMT miscalculation lay in this: had the party produced a convincing argument against Yao's appointment, winning the public debate, it would have been able to retain the loyalty of its members. By focusing on the issue of Yao's support for independence, the party appeared to be exactly as it was characterized by both the DPP and the government, obstructive in even the smallest way to anything the government tried to do. Some KMT legislators, perhaps calculating that breaking with their party on what appeared to be a matter of principal looked better than blindly following the party in its folly, decided as a result to jump ship.

It wasn't just Yao's appointment that the KMT had reason to oppose of course, though that became the cause celebre. More DPP-sympathetic figures on the Council of Grand Justices, the body that interprets the constitution, were seen as a threat - the DPP has long been threatening an investigation and possible stripping of the KMT's huge wealth, an issue which eventually will end up in the grand justice's hands - as was a similar presence on the snooping Control Yuan. The KMT's problem here was that though it wanted to oppose the candidates, it could not openly say why - namely that it has huge amounts of dirty laundry that it was afraid the appointees might decide to wash publicly. But without even the shred of a cover story for its opposition, it simply looked bloody-minded.

In Taiwan voting in the legislature is secret. This is a problem for the whips since there is simply no record of how a legislator voted other than his or her word. Voting against the party line is an ever-present threat, and one that leads to a great deal of corruption. Parties have to give their legislators sweeteners to make sure they vote the right way; other parties try to woo known mavericks. Of course the most powerful suitor for dissidents is the government, with its ownership of the pork barrel and huge patronage powers.

In the run-up to the confirmation voting it became known to the KMT leadership that some of its legislators were going to vote with the DPP and its allies. This was hugely important because the DPP and its small ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), control between them 102 seats in the 225 seat legislature. A plain majority, ie, 113 votes, is needed for confirmation of a presidential appointee. The KMT and People First Party (PFP) between them could muster 115 votes, thereby blocking any confirmation even if the DPP used its patronage powers to woo all the independents to its cause. KMT defectors, however, put the matter in much doubt.

Since the KMT could not trust its own lawmakers, it resolved, along with the PFP, simply to boycott the confirmation sessions. Legislators were told not to enter the chamber on the days of the voting, and the whips patrolled the entrances to make sure they didn't. This created an extraordinary spectacle, an opposition party stopping elected deputies from entering the legislative chamber to vote on a matter of national importance. The media, even though many of them are pro-KMT, had a field day. No matter how within their rights the parties might have been to ask their members to boycott the session and to check that they had done so, the sight of posses of opposition legislators trying to intimidate colleagues against entering the chamber to vote looked like anti-democratic thuggery on the TV news. Unsurprisingly, those KMT legislators who did vote became heroes, upholders of democracy and the rule of law. That they might have had more complex motivations for disobeying their party was not pondered.

In the end, the boycott backfired badly. Several lower-level appointees from the KMT's own ranks - Chen's had to seem impartial - were not confirmed in their positions. Yao, however, was. Seven KMT turncoats had made the crucial difference.

The KMT's hugely inept chairman Lien Chan found himself in a difficult position. His leadership is almost a laughing stock even within his own party - he only retains the post because none of the several pretenders are powerful enough alone to push him out and none of them will aid their rivals. Lien was forced by the defections to call an inquiry by the party's disciplinary committee vowing terrible punishments for the defectors. But all the party could do was to expel four of the seven. Since this was no more than they expected, it probably did the KMT more damage than the lawmakers. The opposition camp has seen its seats cut to 111, less than an overall majority in the chamber, and there are now four more independents, generally seen as votes for hire by the patronage-rich party of government. The once-mighty KMT now controls only two-thirds as many seats as the DPP and has gone from being the senior partner in its alliance with the PFP to being almost the PFP's equal.

But the show didn't end with the vote or even the expulsions that followed it. This week has seen accusations of dirty tricks on the government side, particularly the buying of votes. The rumored price for a vote for Yao is NT$10 million (US$300,000). A candidate to be Yao's deputy, Chang Po-ya, a political independent, claims that a group of legislators "not from the DPP" - by which it is assumed in Taiwan that she means the TSU - offered to sell their votes to her for NT$3 million each, showing her a check the group had received for NT$150 million already for their support in "another vote" - widely assumed to be Yao's.

A KMT legislator, Lee Chia-chin, has been even more specific about some of the shenanigans behind the voting. The price of a vote varied depending on the appointment under consideration. Votes for grand justices and Control Yuan members were worth up to NT$5 million per vote, while votes for Yao could fetch NT$10 million. Meanwhile another lawmaker, Chin Huei-chu of the PFP, claims the DPP tried to buy the votes of three aboriginal legislators from the PFP in support of Yao's nomination for NT$5 million per vote.

On Thursday President Chen came out and categorically denied that there had been any bribery involved, at least by the DPP. Meanwhile the DPP's spin machine has been trying to blame the accusations on the KMT's bad sportsmanship, its inability to accept defeat in a democratic process. Was there bribery involved? Quite possibly. That would after all be politics as usual in Taiwan. Does the public care? Less, perhaps, than it should. After all, if the DPP did buy votes, it only did what the KMT had been doing during its half-century of power. The problem with KMT attacks of this sort is that while they might tarnish the DPP's image, they only do so by making it look more like the KMT. "See, they aren't much different from us" is hardly an election slogan to get the blood pumping.

(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact ads@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)