The Ties That Won’t Bind

It was all spit and tears. The most salient moment in the campaign for Taiwan’s legislative elections last Saturdaya contest the local press ultimately dubbed the “saliva war”came when the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) issued an official press release in which it remarked, without elaborating, that “23 million Taiwanese are wiping the DPP’s ass.” Candidates from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party were not the only ones splashed with vitriol. At one time or another, negative campaigning and personal attacks sent members of each of Taiwan’s four major parties to their knees, weeping. Or at least they put on a good show of crying as the TV cameras recorded their entreaties to the electorate to vote for them out of sympathy. If the candidates had cooked up ideas for pulling the island out of its worst ever recession, they didn’t share them.

The schmaltzy theater and lack of serious debate on the issues led many Taiwanese to write off the campaign as nothing more than a bad joke. But by the time results were tallied on Saturday night, it was clear that, either by serendipity or intent, Taiwan’s voters had orchestrated a revolution, one that is arguably even more sweeping than Chen Shui-bian’s victory in the March 2000 presidential elections. As a result, Taiwan’s relations with mainland China, which regards the island as a renegade province, could become a lot more testy.

When Chen rose to the presidency, ending 50 years of KMT rule, the commissars in Beijing worried that he and the DPP would try to assert formal independence for Taiwan. Those concerns proved unfounded, largely because Chen was constrained by the KMT, which not only retained a majority in the legislature, but also became a pulpit for decidedly pro-China politicians under its mainland-born chairman, Lien Chan. On Saturday, however, voters tore off Chen’s shackles as the KMT won only 68 of the legislature’s 225 seats, down from 123 coming into the vote. Chen’s DPP, meanwhile, will occupy 87 seats, up from 70.

That does not give the President an absolute majority, but it does allow him to strike a deal to lure a few maverick KMT or independent politicians rather than engage in tedious and fragile coalition building, leaving the KMT totally out of the government. For the first time since Chiang Kai-shek’s army fled to Taiwan, it seems likely politicians advocating unification with the mainland have been sidelined.

The indefatigable Lee Teng-hui, who was President for 12 years and chairman of the KMT until he was ousted by pro-China politicians earlier this year, was partly responsible for crippling his former party. Lee was not a candidate in Saturday’s election and holds no governmental position. But you wouldn’t have guessed it judging by his airtime during the campaign and the fact that Taiwan has been papered over with posters bearing his grandfatherly face. The 78-year-old Lee has fashioned himself as the chief backer of the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), a three-month-old party made up of politicians whose chief qualification seems to be that they are friends with Lee Teng-hui.

The TSU might not become a force to be reckoned with, but Lee almost certainly will. Last week, he announced that he will form something called a “do tank,” which he said will be sort of like a think tank, except that it will actually do something: namely, pressure the government and Taiwan’s opposition politicians to think like him. And his campaign speeches made it clear that this means taking a much harder line on China and its sympathizers in the KMT. In one speech, Lee described himself as a prophet who would help release the Taiwanese people from the bondage of an overly powerful KMT and an intrusive China, boasting that “Lee Teng-hui is the only one in the world who’s not afraid of the Chinese communists.”

Within hours of his announcement, Chen said his government was ready to work with the TSU and Lee’s do tank. And there are signs that the former President’s rallying cry has made an impression with large numbers of KMT members who oppose the party’s current stance on cross-strait relations. KMT candidate Chen Hsueh-fen, for example, spent much of the campaign arguing that her party should cooperate more closely with the DPP, a move she said would involve adopting a Lee-esque position on China. If the mainlander element of the KMT proves stubborn, Chen hinted that between 20 and 30 members of the party are ready to act unilaterally, perhaps even defecting to the DPP. While that might be an exaggeration, many analysts believe that a significant chunk of the KMT harbors similar sentiments and that this could, at a minimum, portend a change of leadership and a major rethink of the party’s policy toward Beijing. This would make the KMT even more like Chen Shui-bian’s DPP, and leave the mainland, suddenly, without a Taiwan counterpart advocating reunification.