Leaders of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party are looking all the more like the Republicans in the United States.They know they are marching stoically to their all but certain defeat in the coming elections but can’t or won’t deviate from the orthodoxy out of loyalty to their supreme commanders.
Just like the Republicans who are privately disgusted with how President George Bush is dealing with Iraq but dare not rebel, the DPP candidates for presidential and legislative elections are spellbound under tightening control of Chen Shui-bian who chants the incantation of the gold hoop when he sees fit to whip them into his Taiwan independence line.The primaries that have been just concluded are sealing the fate of the governing party.
Voters go to the polls to elect a new Legislative Yuan in December and their new president in March next year.With the candidates it has nominated, the Democratic Progressive Party is unlikely to hold on to a third of the 113 seats in the new legislature and can’t hope to beat former Kuomintang chairman Ma Ying-jeou in 2008 unless he is convicted of corruption.Its last hope is to legislate the disqualification of Ma as candidate for president when he is proven guilty at the first trial.He is being tried for misusing his expense account while he was mayor of Taipei from 1998 to 2006.
The conviction certainly will handicap the mainlander Ma Ying-jeou, who may be popular among but lack voter support of at least a third of the native-born electorate.These mainly Hoklo people will vote for anybody but a mainlander as president.The Amoy-speaking Hoklo account for close to 70 percent of Taiwan’s population.
On the other hand, the ruling party and its government are trying to combine the December and March elections and call two referendums at the same time to boost their winning chances.One of the referendums is about the recovery of all the assets the Kuomintang had unlawfully acquired during its 55-year-long one-party rule.It aims at liquidating the former ruling party.A larger election-day turnout is believed to help DPP candidates win.
All this does not appear to stop Ma any more now, thanks to President Chen Shui-bian.
Chen resorted to cabalism for imposing his will on DPP candidates.Being a good DPP candidate, according to the president, is to stick together with those dedicated, at least in appearance, to the cause of an independent republic of Taiwan.They should be all cabalists who should not think new and other adventurous thoughts such as a detente or rapprochement with China.Those who stray from this orthodoxy have been accused of treason.
The cabalists were aided by the siege mentality of DPP members and supporters.The party has been brutalized by a spate of corruption scandals involving President Chen, his wife, and their son-in-law.It has fallen victim to its poor governance record.Its popularity, like that of the president’s, has hit an all-time low.All party members are getting ready to rally behind President Chen.
As a result, all reformists or Young Turks, including his former top aide and spin doctor Luo Wen-jia, were weeded out from the nomination of candidates for the December elections.Some of them are consciences of the Democratic Progressive Party but were branded as “traitorous bandits” by Chen’s independence mantra-chanting cabalists.The president wants every candidate to support the creation of a new national identity of Taiwan and his de-Sinicization or hate-China dogma.He wishes to create a new constitution for Taiwan giving the country a new and different national identity by 2008.That is construed in China as independence of Taiwan. The People’s Liberation Army vows to invade Taiwan in that eventuality.
At the presidential level, there were four contestants: Vice President Annette Lu, Premier Su Tseng-chang, his predecessor Frank Hsieh and DPP chairman Yu Shyi-kun.Lu and Hsieh want better relations between Taiwan and China.They tried to advance that adventurous idea and were voted down in the primaries.So had Su wanted, until he was labeled as a “revisionist.”The Su “revisionism” made him an odd man out in the cabalist club like Lu and Hsieh.He had to come back to Chen’s fold to get anointed.Only Yu has never betrayed the Chen orthodoxy.The DPP chairman was dumped, because the president knows he is unelectable.
With the party thus united, President Chen is confident the forthcoming elections can be won to get himself out of the woods. First lady Wu Shu-chen is standing trial.She was indicted on November 3 last year for borrowing receipts and bills from friends and relatives to claim a NT$14.8 million reimbursement from a public fund under her husband’s control for the conduct of “affairs of state.”The president was not indicted, for he is immune against prosecution, but was regarded as an unindicted co-defendant who would be formally charged on leaving office.And he promised to step down if his wife is convicted at the first trial.Should the party lose power next year, the president would be prosecuted and tried.
President Chen and his cabalists forget one thing, however.Their independence orthodoxy turns off middle-of-the road voters who make up at least another third of the electorate.These voters sway national elections.In 1991, the Democratic Progressive Party made Taiwan independence the issue in the election of the National Assembly.It was the one expected to amend the Constitution adopted in Nanjing in 1947.The party was routed in the election, with the then ruling Kuomintang winning a three-fourths majority.The independence scare forced a huge bloc of medial voters to side with the Kuomintang.
What is known as the pan-blue bloc – a loose alliance of the Kuomintang and the People First Party – is supported by an estimated 40 percent of the electorate.All it needs to win is an additional dozen percent of votes which the Democratic Progressive Party is set to hand out by raising the ghost of Taiwan independence.The pan blues will have no difficulty keeping its majority in the new Legislative Yuan.To decisively defeat Su Tseng-chang, however, Ma Ying-jeou has to convince more Hoklo voters that he is “one of them” rather than an outsider Hunanese born in the former British crown colony.
（本文刊載於96.05.07 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）