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Saturday, April 1, 2000
Shaking off threats of war
First woman VP embodies hope By Richard Halloran
from China and 50 years of
Nationalist Party rule, Taiwan's
voters embrace freedom
Special to the Star-Bulletin
As President-elect Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan prepares for his inauguration on May 20, it has become clear that his election has set off a political revolution with implications not only for his nation but for China, for relations between Taiwan and China, and for the march of democracy in the rest of Asia.
The revolution that began with Chen's election on March 18 comprises the rise of the Democratic Progressive Party that has never held national power, severe damage to and possible demolition of the Nationalist Party that had ruled for 50 years, and the climax of a long struggle by native Taiwanese to win political control of their island.
The election of Chen also sent a strong signal that the people of Taiwan wish to remain separated from China and to determine their future themselves. A Western diplomat foresaw this three years ago when he said in a private conversation: "The Taiwanese now have a chance to determine their own destiny for the first time ever."
The ripple-out effect of this revolution will likely spill into the U.S. presidential election campaign, stirring a debate that will range over American policy from military relations with Taiwan to trade with China to U.S. intervention in an armed conflict between China and Taiwan. The House of Representatives voted this week, 418-1, and the Senate unanimously, to congratulate Taiwan on its successful election and called on China to "abandon its provocative threats against Taiwan."The differences have already been drawn. Vice President Albert Gore, the probable Democratic candidate, has adopted President Clinton's policy of "strategic ambiguity," which is intended to keep everyone guessing about what the United States might do about Taiwan. In contrast, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the presumed Republican nominee, has said the U.S. should defend Taiwan.
The most explosive question is whether the result of the election will trigger a military attack on Taiwan by China that would engage the United States -- which has the Pacific Command here burning more than a drop of midnight oil.
For many weeks, China has been thundering threats of missile attack, invasion and even nuclear assault if Taiwan declared independence instead of accepting Beijing's claim that it is part of China. Most assessments of China's military power, however, contend that Beijing would lose such a clash, especially if the United States intervened.
Even so, those threats are dangerous because they might lead to Chinese miscalculation, or to having Beijing's bluff called, which are the causes of most wars.
President-elect Chen has made clear that he has no intention of rousing Beijing's ire with a formal declaration of independence. Three years ago, while he was mayor of Taipei, he said in an interview that such a declaration was unnecessary because Taiwan was already independent.
Chen, an intense man who speaks in a crisp, right-to-the-point manner, set two conditions: that China not attack Taiwan and that "certain large nations," meaning the United States and Japan, not abandon Taiwan. If they did, he said, he would call for a referendum on independence that would surely be adopted.
Since then, he has added a third condition, that negotiations between Taipei and Beijing be conducted between equals, which Beijing has rejected.
In the election, Chen defeated James Soong, a former provincial governor who ran a close second after splitting from the Nationalist Party to run as an independent. They left Vice President Lien Chan, nominee of the Nationalist Party, a distant third.
Since the DPP lacks national experience, Chen quickly began cobbling together a coalition government. This week, he named the present defense minister, Tang Fei, who is well regarded in Washington and is a member of the Nationalist Party, to be premier, meaning chief of cabinet.
Evidence that democracy has put down roots in Taiwan was seen in the election turnout as 83 percent of the eligible voters went to the polling places. That followed the 76 percent who voted in the 1998 legislative elections, and another 76 percent who voted in the 1996 presidential election. In contrast, only 49 percent of American voters went to the ballot box in 1996 when President Clinton defeated Sen. Robert Dole.
Perhaps the most striking evidence that Taiwan's old order is passing has been the crumbling of the Nationalist Party, known as the Kuomintang, which was founded by the revolutionary leader, Sun Yet-sen, here in Honolulu in 1894 as the Hsing Chung Hui, or Society to Revive China. Known also as the KMT, the party ruled Taiwan from 1949, when its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, lost the mainland to Mao Zedong's Communists.
In this election, 75 percent of the voters marked their ballots against the KMT, 39 percent having voted for Chen and 36 percent for Soong. Enraged members of the KMT then forced President Lee Teng-hui to resign as head of the party to take responsibility for its failure.
The KMT will retain a majority in the national legislature but with reduced influence given its defeat at the polls and a widespread perception that it is corrupt. Another source of KMT power, the National Assembly, a separate council that considered constitutional issues, is being disbanded.
In a wider sense, Chen's victory marks the culmination of Taiwanese to wrest political reins from the mainland Chinese who fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek. That movement began in the 1950s with land reform that gave Taiwanese farmers their own land. At the same time, Taiwanese entrepreneurs started businesses that laid the foundation for Taiwan's robust economy today. Subsequently, Taiwanese moved into the government bureaucracy, the universities, the press, the upper ranks of the armed forces, and into politics. President Lee, himself a Taiwanese, rose through the ranks of the KMT.
The victory of the DPP thus reflected a growing sense of identity among the Taiwanese, whose culture and language, while Chinese, are distinct from those on the mainland. The DPP's supporters are largely Taiwanese as opposed to the Chinese supporting the KMT. Polls say the majority of people in Taiwan today, even those with Chinese parents, see themselves as Taiwanese or as both Taiwanese and Chinese.
The long, slow progress from authoritarian rule to democracy in Taiwan has run parallel to democratic movements elsewhere. Chiang Kai-shek was an oppressive authoritarian. His son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who ruled from 1978 to 1988, was less so and President Lee Teng-hui led the transition to democracy and a peaceful transfer of power. Much the same pattern emerged earlier in South Korea.
There is a singular irony here: Sixty years ago, Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule as was Korea. Japan itself was governed by dictatorial militarists. Today, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are thriving democracies with genuine, though not complete, guarantees of civil rights.
The revolution on Taiwan appears to have caused ambivalence in Beijing. On one hand, Chinese leaders celebrated the fall of President Lee. The People's Daily, the Communist Party's newspaper, charged that Lee had been "capricious and deceiving" and had been forced out because he advocated independence for Taiwan.
On the other hand, specialists in Chinese politics speculated that the unraveling of the KMT may set a precedent for a challenge to the Communist Party in Beijing. President Jiang Zemin is beset with feuding within the top ranks of government, with dissent on many sides, separatist moments in Tibet and western China, and 125 million people unemployed.
Chinese leaders, who had openly sought Chen's defeat, were stunned into silence by his victory. Only after several days did they venture to say they would wait and see what Chen would do before deciding their next steps.
Richard Halloran, a former Asia correspondent for the
New York Times, is a freelance writer based in Honolulu.
First woman VP
By Richard Mercier
embodies victory
of hope over fear
Pacific News ServiceTAIPEI -- On the night she was elected Taiwan's first female vice president, Annette Lu called her party's success a victory for "the forces of hope" over the "forces of fear and intimidation."
She might easily have been speaking of her own personal journey. She was born into a poor family, and her parents considered selling her when she was 3 years old. "There was a practice of selling daughters," she says. "Families that did this wouldn't have to pay a dowry."
But, she goes on, "When my parents agreed to sell me, my elder sister and brother were so scared they hid me in my aunt's house."
Her parents finally backed out of the deal. "Later they felt sorry and they began to educate me so that eventually I could become a politician," she says wryly.
But Lu, now 55, took no ordinary path to electoral politics. Before she was first elected to office in 1992, she spent more than two decades in the public spotlight, sparking the women's movement in Taiwan, joining those opposed to martial law and languishing in jail.
In the early 1970s, Lu wrote a series of articles for Taiwan newspapers that almost single-handedly launched the feminist movement in the conservative, Confucian culture.
She was jarred into action, she says, by two events. First, "the government was debating how to prevent women from entering college. They considered that a waste of education."
Second, a Taiwanese graduate student in the United States, suspected of killing his wife because he believed she was having an affair, fled to Taiwan where there was widespread sympathy for him. "They said the wife shouldn't have been unfaithful to the husband," Lu recalls. "So I wrote my articles, criticizing sexual morality."
Lu started resource centers and crisis hotlines for women. In the mid-1970s, feeling stifled in Taiwan, she headed off to Harvard, where she earned a law degree.
Returning to Taiwan in 1978, Lu joined the opposition movement and was selected secretary of a union that promoted dissident political candidates and assistant publisher of Formosa magazine, the major voice of democracy and Taiwan independence advocates.
On International Human Rights Day in 1979, the magazine organized a rally in Kaohsiung, the country's second-largest city. It is widely believed that Nationalist provocateurs infiltrated the rally and incited violence. The government arrested Lu -- who delivered a speech -- and seven others on charges of sedition.
The defense team included a 29-year-old maritime lawyer -- pressured into accepting the case by his wife -- named Chen Shui-bian. For him, and many other Taiwanese, the trial was a political epiphany.
That the dissidents would be convicted was a foregone conclusion. That they were able to use the trial as a forum to put forth their ideas on democracy and a Taiwanese identity separate from China was startling on an island ruled with an iron fist by Nationalists for more than three decades.
Lu was devastated by the 12-year sentence she received. She had been diagnosed with cancer several years earlier and felt she would die in prison. Released in 1985, after serving five and a half years, she went immediately to the United States to seek medical treatment, then continued her studies as a research fellow in Harvard's Human Rights Program.
At this point, she turned her attentions to winning international recognition for Taiwan, which had become increasingly isolated after the United States severed diplomatic relations in 1979. She spent the next several years meeting influential political and social leaders and attending international conferences.
Lu took a seat in the national legislature in 1993, and played a key role on the Foreign Relations Committee. Then President Lee Teng-hui crossed party lines and appointed her a national policy adviser in 1996.
Indeed, Lu has more foreign policy experience than President-elect Chen, and hopes to serve as his adviser on foreign affairs. But Chen may have to sideline Lu if he pursues his conciliatory tack toward Beijing, which still considers Taiwan part of China and warned Taiwanese voters not to vote for Chen's party, which has long sought formal independence from China.
Lu is viewed as representing the party's staunch pro-independence faction and some observers think Chen will try to confine Lu to domestic affairs. Lu says she is not the ideologue some have made her out to be, and that she and Chen have distanced themselves from party factionalism.
Nevertheless, she insists that Taiwan is a de facto independent state, while adhering to Chen's campaign line that there is no need to declare formal independence -- unless China attacks.
"By electing our president, we have made it self-evident that we are an independent, sovereign state," she says. "With or without recognition, it does not matter. It's only sovereign states that have presidential elections."
