One great feature of the presidential campaign in the United States is an issue or issues.So should be in Taiwan, where Ma Ying-jeou, candidate for president of the opposition Kuomintang, is taking on his Democratic Progressive Party rival Frank Hsieh.Voters are set to go to the polls on next March 22 to elect one of them to lead the country for the following four years.There are no campaign issues, however.Save an undeclared one Hsieh wants and Ma tries to shun.
The former mayor of Kaohsiung and premier is a native-born Taipeiite.His grandfather was a xiucai or lowest degree holder passing imperial China’s initial civil service examination, when the Qing court in Beijing ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895, and survived the half century of Japanese colonial rule to resume teaching Chinese briefly, after the island was restored to the Republic of China in 1945.Frank Hsieh obtained a coveted Taiwan University law degree and studied in Japan before launching his political career as a Taipei city councilman.
A son of a Kuomintang apparatchik, Ma was born in Hong Kong and came to Taipei with his family sometime after Chiang Kai-shek fled China at the end of the Chinese civil war and set up his government of the Republic of China in Taiwan in 1949.Like Hsieh, Ma won a law degree from Taiwan’s most prestigious university.He then went on to earn a Harvard S. J. D., and came back to Taipei to work as an interpreter for Chiang’s son, President Chiang Ching-kuo.He served as minister of justice and was elected mayor of Taipei in 1998.After two successful four-year terms in Taipei, he became chairman of the Kuomintang only to resign after he was indicted last year for corruption, charged with misusing his expense account while he was mayor of the capital city.
Prior to his indictment, the Kuomintang chairman seemed invincible.With an almost lily-white clean image, Ma had commanded respect of the electorate fed up with a corrupt government under President Chen Shui-bian, whose first lady is standing trial for corruption.She was indicted for borrowing invoices and receipts 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 enjoys immunity against prosecution, but would be officially charged on leaving office. Their orthopedic surgeon son-in-law was convicted of insider trading, while top government leaders, including Frank Hsieh, and Chen’s close aides are under investigation or being tried for corruption. Hsieh is implicated in a political donation scandal.And like Ma, Hsieh is being charged with misusing his expense account expenses.In fact, he has vowed to withdraw from the 2004 race if he were indicted, albeit he is more than certain that the long arm of law won’t get a grip on him in the next half year or so.
Much less charismatic than Ma and saddled with the corruption-ridden track record of the Chen government, Hsieh has only one chance to win the nation’s highest political office by turning the election into a fight between the islander and the mainlander.Of course, he cannot openly declare war on Ma the mainlander, who is being tried.Hsieh will bill it as the last-ditch battle to prevent resurrection of a Kuomintang or a non-indigenous, alien regime – the heir to Chiang’s autocratic government that imposed a reign of white terror over Taiwan in his unsuccessful anti-Communist campaign to recover the China mainland he had lost.
Should Hsieh succeed in making the islander-mainlander feud the tacit campaign issue, Ma would lose the battle royal next year.The mainlander whose best appeal used to be his high integrity would be helpless, for Hsieh’s appeal is emotional, not rational.The Democratic Progressive Party has support of a third of the voters, though the Kuomintang and its ally People First Party have a little larger combined power base.The remaining one third, almost all of them islanders, are swing voters. They are middle-class, intelligent.They would vote for Ma under ordinary circumstances or if his Mr. clean image were not tainted. An emotional appeal by Hsieh – “Why should we islanders elect a mainlander after Taiwan has already voted in two of us as presidents?” – would swing these voters against Ma.
The fact is that Taiwan is not yet ready to accept a mainlander, any mainlander, as its president.It may in a dozen years, as the aging islanders who never forget the bloody February 28 Incident of 1947 are passing away.The timing is against Ma now.Had Lien Chan placed Ma on his Kuomintang ticket in 2004, they would have beaten Chen and Annette Lu.A majority of native islanders could not accept Lien’s running mate James Soong the mainlander as a man a heartbeat away from the presidency.If the coming presidential election had taken place last year at the height of Shih Ming-teh’s March of One Million campaign to topple President Chen, Ma whose cleanliness was then intact would have handily won.More than a million people, each chipping in NT$100 to raise over NT$100 million as their war chest, joined in the nationwide anti-corruption drive organized by Shih, a former chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party and a starry-eyed revolutionary once sentenced to life for sedition by a military tribunal for his leading role in the Formosan Magazine Incident in Kaohsiung in 1979.Like a phoenix, President Chen survived two recalls initiated by the Legislative Yuan, thanks to the solid support of the lawmakers of his ruling party.
Hard as the Kuomintang may try, it can hardly offer any better campaign issue to abort Frank Hsieh’s master plan to pit the islander against the mainlander.The Kuomintang nominated Wang Min-ning, a general who was Taiwan’s police commissioner during the February 28 Incident, to run for mayor of Taipei against Henry Kao in 1954.Kao won and ran for the second time in 1968 after eight years away from politics.He beat Dr. Chou Po-lien, a Tapeiite hand-picked by the ruling Kuomintang.Chiang Kai-shek, who was then still alive and very much kicking, was shocked to learn that Chou lost, because the doctor who was made acting mayor should have been elected if members of the Kuomintang in the city and their spouses had voted for him.Chou acted for Huang Chi=jui, who was convicted of corruption.In other words, many islander Kuomintang members voted for Kao.Nobody dared tell the aging president why.
They defected, though they suspected Henry Kao was corrupt.But they, along with most non-Kuomintang voters, believed the municipal administration would be equally corrupt anyway and preferred Kao raking in graft money to Chou doing so as a lackey for the party of the mainlanders.
（本文刊載於96.08.06 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
