Taiwan's presidential race

Big election in little China

Jan 11th 2012, 8:18 by J.R. | TAIPEI

TAIWAN’S presidential election on January 14th seems set to decide the future of this unusual island’s relations with China. But in final days of campaigning, Ruifang, an obscure former mining town on Taiwan’s woody north-eastern coast, was entranced by the more personal aspects of a visit from the incumbent candidate, Ma Ying-jeou—and with the carnival atmosphere that accompanied him.

Cymbals clashed for a gaudy lion-dance performance through the streets, before Mr Ma told over 1,000 of his supporters, packed under a brightly striped tent, that his ruling Kuomintang (KMT) has improved relations with China and is bringing them towards a lasting peace.

“I have made my stance clear—no unification, no independence, no use of force—right?” he said. “Right,” roared the crowd.

Attendees were handed red plastic amulets to be worn around the neck. Known as a Taiwan ping’an fu, signifying peace and safety, they share a homonym with the traditional Taoist amulets distributed at Taiwan’s temples for protection.

The president came up with this campaign gimmick in early November, after the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) accused the KMT of being a “big bad wolf” that favoured big business at the expense of ordinary people. In a nod to the Three Little Pigs, they launched a fundraising campaign that sent round 100,000 piggy banks to collect small political donations for the party. The piggy banks had nothing to do with the party’s pro-independence stance, but they were a hit. By January 6th, the DPP said, they had helped rake in $6.7 million.

Mr Ma’s amulets tie in with his themes of cross-strait warming (and he has raised buckets of them over incense burners at temples, to be blessed on the campaign trail), but they have not been so popular.

In addition to passing out plastic election kitsch, Mr Ma has been talking a big game about boosting stagnant wages and tamping down rocketing housing prices and unemployment. However there is no escaping the fact that at the heart of the election there is going to be a vote on this vibrant, democratic island’s future relations with the giant authoritarian state on the mainland.

Ever since Mr Ma was elected four years ago, he has strived to bring an end to the era of cold-war-style hostilities with China, now six decades old. New business accords, such as the institution of direct flights across the strait of Taiwan, agreements on tourism and a partial free-trade pact inked last year have all been part of the larger project. Beijing, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province to be brought back to the fold, has been happy to offer Mr Ma economic sweeteners in the hope that under his direction the Taiwanese public will develop fonder feelings towards China. In the long run, China's leaders hope for the island to become so enmeshed in the mainland’s enormous economy as to make unification an inevitability.

Sweeteners and blessed amulets notwithstanding, the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen, a former academic, is now running neck-and-neck with Mr Ma. Although Ms Tsai is a moderate and does not favour rolling back Mr Ma’s commercial initiatives, she is deeply mistrusted in Beijing. China’s leaders remembers the 2000-2008 rule of Chen Shui-bian, a firebrand for independence when he was president, now stuck in prison for corruption. A win by Ms Tsai bring back the bad old days of military tension. The overarching—and perhaps insurmountable—sticking point between Ms Tsai and China’s government has to do with her refusal to accept an informal cross-strait consensus reached over a decade ago. The consensus holds that Taiwan is “a part of China”, though the two sides may disagree on the meaning of that. Accepting the consensus is Beijing’s bottom line. Analysts say that China has been floored by Ms Tsai’s surge of support in recent months and that it is psychologically unprepared for a DPP government, a situation that could give ammunition to hardliners in Beijing who were already opposed to taking a softer stance on Taiwan. This dynamic could be complicated further by China’s leadership transition, due in autumn this year, when Chinese president Hu Jintao is expected to hand over the leadership of the Chinese Communist Part to Xi Jinping, a fellow moderate.

Bruce Jacobs, a professor of politics at Australia’s Monash University, says Mr Ma is definitely Beijing’s preferred candidate. Mr Ma is also believed to be favoured in Washington; America has pledged to help Taiwan defend itself from Chinese attack—and does not want another crisis on its hands.

Concerns about security, however, were the last thing on the mind for many of Ruifang’s residents. Zhou Su-fen, a retired nurse who was standing next to a roadside stall selling all kinds of pro-Ma paraphernalia (including dolls of Mr Ma dressed in skimpy running gear), echoed others in the crowd when she said that for her the rally was simply an opportunity to see all the political figures she knew from television—in person, for the first time. Like many attendees at KMT rallies, she said she preferred Mr Ma’s government for being less corrupt than the DPP (though everyone regards Ms Tsai herself as being perfectly clean).

A deciding factor in the election will be the performance of another pro-China presidential candidate, James Soong, a former high-ranking member of the KMT, who is running as an independent. Although Mr Soong normally commands only 10% of the vote or less, any surge of support for him in this tight race would siphon more precious votes away from Mr Ma than from Ms Tsai.

Taiwan will be holding elections for its 113-seat legislature at the same time. The DPP, which holds fewer than a third of the seats, is expected to improve its standing. A hung parliament is not out of the question, which could slow the speed of the cross-strait thaw, even if Mr Ma wins.

one up
Having an advantage or lead over someone, as in Sara is one up on Jane because she passed algebra in summer school. This expression comes from sports, where it means to be one point ahead of one's opponents. It was transferred to more general use about 1920.

紐約時報:Ties to China Linger as Issue as Taiwanese Prepare to Vote

By ANDREW JACOBS

Published: January 4, 2012

TAIPEI, Taiwan — As he nears the end of his first term, President Ma Ying-jeou faces a litany of challenges that might sound familiar to Western politicians: stagnant wages, a growing wealth gap and steep housing prices that have frozen young urbanites out of the real estate market.

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Taiwan/Reuters

Tsai Ing-wen, Mr. Ma's main opponent, shakes hands with supporters. China has expressed concern that a victory for Ms. Tsai could hamper relations between the two nations.

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Taiwan's Noisy Presidential Elections

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Pichi Chuang/Reuters

President Ma Ying-jeou greets supporters from his vehicle during a campaign rally.

His main opponent in this month’s elections has vowed to create well-paid jobs, 800,000 units of low-cost housing and more generous subsidies for retirees and farmers.

But when voters go to the polls on Jan. 14 — only the fifth time they have done so since Taiwan threw off single-party rule in 1996 — they will also be guided by their views on a separate, overwhelmingly important issue: whether this vibrantly democratic island of 23 million should speed, slow or halt its wary embrace of China.

The calamitous mainland civil war that drove the defeated Nationalists here in 1949 left China and Taiwan in a formal state of war. China’s singular aim is reunification, even if it requires military force, and each side has kept a wary eye on the other through decades of internal tumult. The question of their fraught relations — culturally close, politically suspicious — grow ever more urgent as China’s wealth and regional influence expand, and ever more obvious as mainlander tourism here surges.

Mr. Ma, 61, a Nationalist, has overseen a raft of agreements that have revolutionized the way ordinary Chinese and Taiwanese interact. There are now direct flights, postal services and new shipping routes between Taiwan and the mainland, and a landmark free trade agreement has slashed tariffs on hundreds of goods.

The agreements opened the gates to the deluge of Chinese tourists — 213,000 arrived in November, 30 percent more than in November 2010 — who buoyed the local economy with more than $3 billion in spending last year. Other firsts include a pair of giant pandas from China, an early reward for Mr. Ma’s Beijing-friendly gestures, and nearly 1,000 mainland students who now study at Taiwan universities.

The burst of contact has reawakened old sensitivities and raised new ones.

Nathan Batto, a political scientist at the Academia Sinica, a research institute in Taipei, said that the underlying issue for many voters was whether Taiwan could remain autonomous.

“The single question that frames all elections here is who we are and what do we want to be,” he said. “Should Taiwan get closer to China or keep its distance?”

The United States has not publicly weighed in on the race, but, privately, some officials have expressed unease over the candidacy of Mr. Ma’s main opponent. She is Tsai Ing-wen, 55, an academic and former government minister whose Democratic Progressive Party has traditionally advocated formal independence. In the past, pushes for independence have irritated China and worried Washington, Taiwan’s steadfast ally and its supplier of military hardware.

Beijing has not been coy in telegraphing its preference. At a recent news conference, a spokesman for its Taiwan Affairs Office said a victory for Ms. Tsai could “inevitably threaten the peaceful development of cross-strait ties.”

In Taiwan, the welter of factions includes indigenous residents and descendents of the mainland Chinese who settled here decades, or even centuries, before the Nationalists arrived. Business-minded Taiwanese know where the money is: the million or so Taiwanese now working and investing in China appear to be backing the Nationalists and Mr. Ma.

“We certainly don’t want to jeopardize the status quo,” said Liu Chia-hao, a spokesman at Taipei 101, an iconic green-glass tower that dominates the Taipei horizon. Mr. Liu said that mainland visitors packing the building’s observatory and high-end shops helped the $1.8 billion project break even three years early.

“We’d like this vibe to continue,” he said.

Even in some of Ms. Tsai’s party’s traditional bases of support, like the largely ethnic Taiwanese population of southern Pingtung County where she was born, are tilting toward the Nationalists. Since 2008, mainland officials, encouraged by Mr. Ma’s new trade policies, have been offering princely sums for every last mango, banana and orchid the Pingtung farmers grow.

“President Ma promised he would open agricultural markets to China, and in his first month he did,” said Cheng Cheng-ying, manager of the Taiwan Floriculture Exports Association.

Invoking the blue flag of the Nationalists and the green of Ms. Tsai’s party, he said, “If you ask my neighbors, they say they are green, but inside they have all become a little bit blue.”

But warming ties have also stoked deeply rooted fears, fanned by Ms. Tsai and her party, that the island is becoming too cozy with the authoritarian behemoth next door.

“Let’s face it, China wants nothing more than to devour us, and the K.M.T. is giving us away,” Zhou Zhu-zhen, a retired nurse, said last month during a rally, using an acronym for the Nationalists.

The race has been dominated by parochial concerns and mudslinging. Last week, Ms. Tsai and her surrogates accused the president of using the intelligence authorities to monitor her campaign illegally. The Ma camp has been raising questions about Ms. Tsai’s role in a state-financed biotech company that yielded her handsome profits. Both have denied any wrongdoing.

On paper and in person, the two bear striking similarities. Educated abroad — Mr. Ma at Harvard and New York University, and Ms. Tsai at Cornell and the London School of Economics — they spent their early careers in academia. Both are reluctant campaigners, wonkish rather than telegenic. Each promises generous social spending and a city’s worth of low-cost housing.

Polls suggest that they are in a statistical dead heat, with a third candidate, James Soong of the People’s First Party, pulling roughly a tenth of the vote, mostly from the incumbent. Ms. Tsai hopes to prevail with her party’s traditional supporters: besides the island’s native Taiwanese and the farmers in the south, they include blue-collar workers who dream of a return to the 1990s, when Taiwan was a high-tech manufacturing powerhouse.

The front-runners dance gingerly around the issue of China. It emerges mostly in the form of debate on the so-called 1992 Consensus, a nebulous pact between Beijing and Nationalist Party leaders that allows both to recognize the principle of one China, bypassing uncomfortable details. Ms. Tsai, a former minister of the Mainland Affairs Council, which helps set cross-strait policy, says the arrangement is a fiction. She wants the voters to determine how Taiwan defines itself in future negotiations with China.

Although she has dialed down her party’s stridency on independence, Ms. Tsai warns that Nationalist policies are eroding Taiwan’s sovereignty. In an interview, she offered a simple example of distasteful compromise: “When Chinese visitors come, we have to put away our flags,” she said.

Mr. Ma waves off such complaints, saying that détente has strengthened the island’s global standing.

Beijing has halted efforts to wrest away the few remaining countries that recognize Taiwan diplomatically, and has removed its longtime opposition to the island’s participation in some international bodies. The last three years of calm across the straits, Mr. Ma said, have been good for the island and the region.

“Taiwan is no longer regarded as a troublemaker,” Mr. Ma said in an interview, “but as a force for peace.”

62屆『NHK紅白歌合戦』（エヌエイチケイこうはくうたがっせん）2011/12/31陰勝陽衰
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