Taiwan Blog Feed

Taiwan Journal hosts a commentary by David Lorenzo of Virginia Wesleyan on how the election confirms Taiwan's maturing democracy. This article describes what has become the new, and very widespread CW:

Taiwan's recent presidential election did more than just determine the future of its executive branch and signal future directions in policy with China. It also underlined the growth and maturation of Taiwan's democracy and revealed important aspects of Taiwan's democratic conception.

Why are we so mature? Lorenzo follows the CW in saying that it shows that Taiwanese are willing to throw leaders out when things go wrong:

This formula appears to be the concept of democracy people on Taiwan embrace: democracy is the election of leaders who make policy decisions. Leaders are then held accountable for their policies and re-elected if successful and voted out of office if they fail.

Bracketing discussion of the Presidential level, let's look at the legislature. Are people willing to toss out the leaders? Clearly not -- the KMT and its allied parties have controlled the legislature after each and every election since the KMT set up its government-in-exile here in 1949. At the local level, the town councils are overwhelmingly KMT, and the township and village chiefs, and the neighborhood and precinct captains, are also overwhelmingly KMT. At those separate levels, it has basically been that way since the KMT set up its government in exile here. Are the people willing to "throw the bastards out?" Nope. Lorenzo's claim that Taiwanese hold politicians accountable for their policies is unsupportable -- the KMT and its allies have been a disaster for the last eight years in the legislature, but they were voted in by a comfortable margin in the most recent election.

The apparent exceptions to the unwillingness of the people to remove one party when it is a failure were the two presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, and the county chief elections, where DPP and KMT politicians have traded places several times in several counties.

Looking at the level of presidential elections, was the public really willing to "throw the bastards out?" In 2000 over 60% of the populace voted Blue -- Chen got elected by a minority. The 2004 election represents the only major election in which Greens outpolled Blues -- and if the KMT had run Ma in '04, they probably would have won then too. So stupid was the choice of Lien Chan that I have a good friend who argues the KMT lost the election on purpose so that it could complete a thorough discrediting and crushing of the DPP.

In other words, if you step past the rhetoric and look at history, there is little or no support for the CW claim that the public judges on policies and is willing to toss politicians out when they don't perform on policy....

The opposite of this is also true: successful policy implementation should result in increased prospects for electoral success, but that is not the case here in Taiwan. Consider -- after Chen Shui-bian cleaned up Taipei and made it into the city it is today, he was immediately tossed out for an unproven KMT politician with no experience of local government. Similarly the DPP's Chen Chu won Kaohsiung by a razor thin margin in the last election even though the previous DPP mayor, Frank Hsieh, had done a fantastic job.

And do you agree with this statement below? With Ma soon to be in power?

A maturing democracy does not entail the perfection of the political system, but this election demonstrates that Taiwan's democratic system has a secure and bright future.

I sure hope so....

[Taiwan]

I'm off camping in Gukeng, the center of Taiwan's coffee production. Coffee-themed kitsch on a galactic scale.... Meantime lots of commentary out there on the Taiwan election. First is this disturbing editorial from Taiwan News on the human rights situation and the KMT. The money quote:

However, many actions and statements of KMT legislators since Ma's victory Saturday have already sent chills down the spines of Taiwan citizens concerned with protecting our hard-won human rights.

The most disturbing example is the call issued by KMT lawmakers for the minister of national defense to "swear allegiance" to the president-elect even before Ma is inaugurated May 20.

We applaud the decision by Defense Ministry's Tsai Ming-hsien, Taiwan's first truly civilian defense minister, to reject the demand for such an oath which are only common in personal dictatorships or one-party authoritarian states.

The demands for a declaration of personal allegiance to Ma Ying-jeou were not raised by Ma himself, but, apparently without any sense of historical irony or shame, by KMT Legislator Chiang Hsiao-yen, the illegitimate grandson of the late KMT dictator Chiang Kai-shek, and other right-wing KMT lawmakers.

Don't worry! The KMT has changed. It's not the old KMT, you know. They wear much better suits now....

Also on tap is neocon John Bolton speaking sense on Taiwan in the LATimes. Damn! I hate when neocons say things I like:

For the United States, the clearest way of expressing that support is to give full diplomatic recognition to the state that already exists and that the Taiwanese overwhelmingly wish to preserve. Maintaining ambiguous, informal ties to Taiwan is confusing and potentially dangerous; it obscures Beijing's understanding of just how committed the United States is to Taiwan's defense and self-determination.

Recognition would bring stability and certainty, thus actually lowering the risks that Beijing will misinterpret the U.S. position and threaten or actually commence military action to regain Taiwan. Extending diplomatic recognition would no more prejudice the U.S.' "one China" policy (itself an exercise in confusion and ambiguity) or the ultimate issue of reunification than did U.S. recognition of the two Germanys during the Cold War.

The Japan Times gives some Japan-centered thoughts on the election (hat tip to Sponge Bear):

The biggest concern now is Beijing's understanding of Taiwanese politics. It has wooed KMT leaders for several years and they have reciprocated. But if Beijing expects the new president to sharply alter course, then it is sure to be disappointed. Mr. Ma has said that "before we can talk about peace, we need to remove the threat," a reference to the 1,000 missiles reportedly arrayed against Taiwan. Mr. Ma has also promised to increase defense spending to about 3 percent of GDP. That does not sound like a man ready for unification. Fortunately, with the Olympics on the horizon, China will have little appetite for tension.

Mr. Ma also reportedly wants to elevate relations with Japan. Japan overtook the U.S. in 2006 as Taiwan's second-largest trading partner: Two-way trade nearly reached $63 billion, and 2.3 million tourists were exchanged. While the KMT has traditionally been cool on relations with Tokyo, Mr. Ma is said to want to launch negotiations on a free-trade agreement. Those talks will be tricky: China is sure to take offense at any deal that appears to prevent reunification.

Mr. Ma has his work cut out for him. But the scale of his victory should provide a solid foundation for his administration. Taiwan's voters appear to understand his priorities and appear ready to back a pragmatic agenda. Most significantly, the alternation of power — from KMT to DPP and back to KMT — is powerful reassurance about the state of democracy in Taiwan.

Much of the logic in these centrist pieces is quite strange. While they all struggle to show that Ma isn't going to be Beijing's lapdog and paint rosy pictures of possible conflicts between Ma and Beijing -- think what the mere existence of such a discourse implies about what the reality is -- they all gloss over the fact that in order to accomplish his economic programs, Ma absolutely needs Beijing.

UPDATE: Businessweek has the latest in the string of articles that have been appearing since late December on the changes in China that are pushing firms to relocate abroad. Most readers are familiar with the effects of the rising yuan and the new labor laws, but I had not known that at the same time China had canceled rebates on materials used in export processing:

The rise of the yuan may be the biggest single factor driving companies to relocate. But other government policies are contributing to the crisis. Last year, Beijing decided to cut or cancel tax rebates on more than 2,000 items used to make exported goods. The impact has been huge. "The end of rebates has raised the cost of manufacturing many goods by 14% to 17% at the factory level," says Harley Seyedin, president of the Guangzhou-based American Chamber of Commerce in South China.

What happens is this: in many developing countries switching to an export orientation, tax rebates on stuff used to make exports is a very common policy, found in Taiwan during its heyday as well. Let's imagine I import steel to make toys for export. When I import the steel, I have to pay an import tax or customs duty. However, if I use that steel to make toys which I export, the government refunds me the import tax I paid on the steel. That way the cost of importing the steel isn't included in the cost of the product, holding production costs down. This also means that if I use the steel to make something sold domestically, its cost will be higher (all other things being equal) since there is no rebate on the steel, meaning that local consumers pay more than foreign consumers. The higher costs thus hold consumption down at home, increasing savings.


Factoids of the day: A friend passed along J Michael Cole's observation that while Ma is always "Harvard-educated," Hsieh was never "Kyoto-educated." Future would-be presidents, take note!

Here's something I didn't notice until last night. While the government announced that it had opened more than 6,000 cases of vote buying during the legislative elections, how many did you hear of during the Presidential election?

[Taiwan]

Some comments in no particular order:

First the mea culpa. I was totally wrong on the swing vote, as Forumosa poster Mick stopped by to caustically remind me in a comment that I lost (along with about 12 others in a Blogger error). The swing vote was about twice as big as I thought. More on that in a later post when the CEC gets detailed numbers out.

I'm switching to Wordpress soon. Tired of Blogger.

One thing I've noted in this blog is that the south is not the stronghold of the DPP that people tend to think. One of the analytical articles in the Taipei Times had a nifty blurb on that:

Tsai Chia-hung (蔡佳泓), an associate research fellow at National Chengchi University's Election Study Center, said that it was a myth that the south has traditionally been the stronghold of the DPP, at least not in the 2000 presidential election.

Statistics showed that except for Tainan County, the KMT ticket of former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) and Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) and the independent ticket of James Soong (宋楚瑜) and Chang Chao-hsiung (張昭雄) together garnered more votes in Kaohsiung County, Kaohsiung City, Tainan City and Pingtung County than thee DPP ticket.

In the 2004 presidential election, the ratio between DPP and KMT tickets in the south changed from 4 to 5 to 5 to 4 and in Tainan County from 4 to 5 to 6 to 3.

There was nothing surprising about the KMT winning Kaohsiung -- the city council is Blue dominated, meaning that the local precincts are Blue, meaning that there are lots and lots of Blue voters. The mayoral vote in 2006 was quite tight. It was Tainan city that was the stunner. Talking to people yesterday and today down in Tainan, the response was "the Blue voters are more tightly organized (tuan jie)" and that lots and lots of Greens stayed home. There was great anger at Chen. Amazingly, despite the far worse record of the KMT in the legislature, there was no great anger at the KMT. Go figure....

Some media comments. The China Times discusses how voters chose a globalized Taiwan. The foreign press displayed its usual trends -- Keith Bradsher's backgrounder on Ma Ying-jeou is a hilarious puff piece that completely sanitizes Ma. And just for a historical note, BBC once again quoted Emile Sheng, the pro-KMT commentator, without noting his position.

"But politically, we should not expect too much. The two sides need to build up mutual trust. Improved political relations will not be his first priority." Emile Sheng, professor of political science at Soochow University, agrees.

Ah, the foreign media. As predictable as an annoying friend.....

I'd like to return to something. Anyone remember this from July of 2005:

Ma was widely touted by the media as the favorite, but he was certainly a very odd favorite. When the vote took place, three quarters of the party's legislators, many high-level party officials such as central executive committee head Chang Che-shen and more than 100 retired generals - the KMT is traditionally strong in the military - had thrown their support behind Wang. The party ruled Taiwan, often brutally, for 55 years until losing power in 2000.

And all the stuff about the split between Ma and the southern Taiwanese legislators, the rivalry between Ma and Wang? Nothing. The KMT displayed awesome organizational unity. No criticism of Ma was breathed. At the local level sophisticated party networks knew exactly what was going on -- in our district the KMT reps knew how many votes they'd get -- to the exact vote at one precinct, and within 5 at the other.

People criticized me when I argued that the legislative election produced what would be a permanent majority. Heh -- when in the last 60 years did the KMT not control the legislature? The DPP's problem is that it reigned, but did not rule....

Raj said my description of the future below was too negative. He wanted to know what would happen in the next two-three years. That's simple -- always assuming that the US can prevent the subprime crisis from exploding the world economy, we're going to see a construction and real estate boom here. Construction and related stocks rose in the market on Monday. International capital backed Ma and they are going to want their reward now. Chinese money will also flow in. Many things might block that -- Chinese with $$ might prefer to invest it at home for higher returns -- which many already do, using the same Virgin Islands route that Taiwanese firms do. Or the US economy may implode. Oil prices, Taiwan's clinically insane land use laws....lots of things might turn out to be stumbling blocks.

But I think Ma is going to move fast. The infrastructure spending he has planned to "save" the economy is contingent on obtaining stable supplies of gravel, and there is only one developed source ready and able to supply: China. How China will use that leverage remains to be seen.

Incidentally, that neat little dirty trick the KMT played with former AIT director Doug Paal on Saturday, where they brought Paal in to speak "authoritatively" on the Green Card issue, illuminates some of the connections between international capital and the KMT: Paal is now a vice chairman at JP Morgan.

Unless the DPP completely turns itself around and adopts a totally new and inclusive party vision, engaging in something it has never done -- massive, sincere coalition building -- we're looking at permanent KMT rule. It will take a gargantuan KMT eff-up coupled with a mighty DPP resurgence to prevent a second Ma term. At this point, Ma could be found having sex with a sheep at rush hour on Ketegalen Blvd, and the only consequence would be that women would call the sheep to ask what its secret was...

When did the DPP lose this election? Lots of different times, but for myself, I think it happened back in the 1990s when a party stalwart named Shih Ming-te introduced Chen Shui-bian to a wheeler-dealer with lots of shady connections named Chen Che-nan. The uptake of Chen Che-nan into the A-bian circle meant that the DPP would become like the KMT, tapping into government expenditures to replenish its coffers, instead of maintaining its reformist path. Chen Che-nan's shenanigans would be one of the major scandals of the Chen Administration, even though he was later acquitted. Readers will be able to identify other turning points: when Lee Teng-hui started the TSU instead of bringing those legislators into the DPP, when the DPP blew the 2004 legislative elections due to bad strategy, and when it agreed to a legislative "reform" that was less democratic than the original one....

[Taiwan]

Old military works outside of the port of Keelung.

...excerpted with permission from Mai Che-en's The Political Economy of the Taiwan Special Administrative Region 2008-2016, published in June of 2017, Armonk: ME Sharpe.

....in the summer of 2008 controls on Chinese investment in Taiwan were lifted, and both Chinese capital and international capital flowed into Taiwan to drive up real estate prices in urban areas around the island, especially in the north. This writer recalls, nearly a decade ago now, speaking to an aide to a former US senator turned lobbyist, who remarked in anticipation of the triumph of Ma that came four days later: "We've been lining up clients for two years for a Ma victory."

The influx of international capital resulted in a real estate boom, and secondarily, a boom in services. Taiwan's underdeveloped leisure industry also received a jolt from Chinese tourists. Months prior to the 2008 election, foreign companies had been quietly revising Taiwan's infrastructure. While writing this book I had the pleasure of staying in the Far Eastern hotel complex right next to the Tainan Train station, whose renovations began in 2007, also in anticipation of Ma's victory. Nowadays Chinese tourists arrive regularly at the airport outside of Kaohsiung, and then are immediately whisked to the hotel where they go on tours of Tainan's historical sites. None of them know, of course, that the five star hotel they pay such extravagant prices for began life as an office building that had sat for years, unused....

...but it was obvious in hindsight what would happen. As Taiwan's industries offshored to China, with the last of the major semiconductor firms leaving in 2011, tourism and real estate boomed. Yet a growing uneasiness with the new, American style casino economy of rapidly rising income disparities, continuing income stagnation, and stagnant productivity could have led to the revival of a working class social justice movement. How was the threat of working class revolt averted?

The roots of the answer lie in the legislative election of 2008, the first of the many elections that have since given the KMT an unbreakable grip on the island's local electoral politics. That year a major electoral reform created winner-take-all districts, a move that many later came to see as a crucial setback for democracy. With its superiority in cash and unrivaled local networks, the KMT easily won a large majority, one that it has been able to preserve over time. While vote buying was a time-honored practice in Taiwan's elections, the 2008 Presidential election and subsequent legislative elections brought back the long unused practice of ballot box stuffing. Though few outside Taiwan realize it, the routine use of schools and other community centers as polling stations means that in practice the ballots are stored, counted, and processed by KMT supporters, since those institutions are heavily KMT controlled.

However, to win the 2008 elections, the KMT spent large sums of money. In order to recoup this expenditure, the KMT-controlled legislature then turned on the infrastructure faucets, creating flows of funds into their patronage networks which legislators then tapped. For eight years the KMT had starved the island's infrastructure spending in a bid to reduce incomes and discredit the DPP. This strategy was highly successful. The working class, which had suffered the most, experienced growth in household incomes as the flow of money out from the central government revived local construction and with it, local incomes. Essentially, the working class was bought off. KMT coffers were replenished as well. Out of the loop, the DPP, the TSU, and the Green Party remained impotent and impoverished, unable to gain any political traction.

The political effects of this were profound. KMT planners, adept at divide-and-rule strategies, also revived the party labor unions to divide the working class and prevent it from allying with the DPP. The DPP's own attempts to forge links with the working class suffered from its history of using the social justice movements to get in power, and then spurning them. With the KMT in sole control of government funding flows, local factions that had been allied to the DPP returned to the KMT, eliminating the DPP as a local political force throughout most of the island. Additionally, the flow of construction money, combined with the resurgent power of local clan and patron networks, kept workers in line. When those failed, there was always the threat of violence. The 2010 murders of four labor activists in Taoyuan by unidentified thugs still resonates among labor leaders seven years later.....

...the first three years of the Ma Administration saw excellent economic figures driven by increased public debt fueling massive public construction and asset inflation, especially in the north. This was accomplished over the strident objections of the Central Bank, resulting in the replacement of two central bank governors by an impatient President Ma. Completion of the Suhua Highway in the first Ma administration was followed immediately by commencement of work on the widely-derided tunnel through the central mountain range, by far the longest in the world, to connect Hualien on the east coast with Taichung on the west, planned to cut travel times to under an hour. The tunnel is under construction as of this writing. Except in certain service industries, however, productivity growth was non-existent, and the Administration took a hit when it closed many universities in the early 2010s due to falling enrollment and the funding pinch. Incomes remained stagnant, undercut by rising inflation driven by rapidly increasing land prices and expanding public expenditures. There was even suspicion in certain quarters that the economic numbers were becoming unreliable. Nevertheless, entrenched and well supported by local networks, the KMT won another resounding victory over the increasingly irrelevant and poorly-funded DPP in the legislative election of 2011. In 2012 Ma, riding the excellent economic growth of 2008-11, was easily able to achieve re-election against DPP Chairman Su Tseng-cheng. The DPP then broke up into its constituent factions. Five years later it remains a spent force...

....The real estate boom in the north and rising public construction lead inevitably to upward pressure on local wages, and thence, in turn to the importation of Chinese labor. The first Chinese laborers actually began arriving in the summer of 2010, as an "emergency measure" for "temporary labor" during peak construction periods. As Heinlein once noted, there is no such thing as a temporary emergency, and sure enough, two years later permanent flows of Chinese labor were legalized, leading, among other things, to diplomatic protests from the government of the Philippines, which was dependent on Filipinos in Taiwan for a large portion of its foreign exchange. Local businesses eagerly welcomed cheaper Chinese workers, arguing that it would enable retention of industry on the island, though by then the island's industries had largely left. Hardest hit by job losses, the aboriginal community remains strangely loyal to the KMT. Perhaps that is a legacy of....

...in the second Ma Administration was a foregone conclusion. With the onset of a genuine recession in 2012, and over 400,000 Chinese laborers in Taiwan, clashes between local workers and Chinese workers became commonplace, especially in the south, where Chinese laborers moved about only in groups even in the day. Protests from Beijing rose concomitantly. In June of 2015 President Ma was summoned to Beijing for talks, accompanied by an ailing Lien Chan, confined to a wheelchair, but still honorary chairman of the KMT. The now famous 17 Point Treaty was finalized, and....

UPDATE: Hai Tien had a great response below. I've put it up here.

... however, the shift by the KMT to a more Taiwan-centric position proved to be permanent. Senior cadres amongst the CPC were sorely disappointed to find that the growing Taiwanese identity continued unabated under President Ma, despite what was ostensibly portrayed initially in the international media as a pro-China government.

Despite increased cross-strait economic exchanges, the rising cost of manufacturing in the PRC, as well as increasing political instability spreading from the west of that country, ensured that future Taiwanese investment remained more or less at prior levels. In pursuit of ever cheaper labor, low level manufacturing continued moving into underdeveloped countries in Southeast Asia, and later - Africa.

... internal reforms undertaken by the DPP included large-scale decentralization, and the dismantling of the former KMT-inspired Stalinist party structure in favor of delegating increased power to local party offices - a move that would later be emulated by most political parties by 2012. Galvanized by their 2008 electoral loss, the DPP sought to convey a more professional image, a newfound emphasis on recruiting capable administrators and policy experts, as well as cosponsoring bipartisan legislation on various levels. The presence for the first time in Taiwan, of a responsible opposition party, continued the consolidation of liberal democracy in Taiwan. Coupled with the implication of several prominent KMT members in the Casino-gate scandal of late 2009, the DPP staged a major comeback in the 2010 local elections, winning Taichung City for the first time since 1997...

Yep. The future could go many ways. But crucial to a positive outcome is the revitalization of the DPP in the directions you've named. It's practically been a religious invocation on my blog that they need a professional chairman. And they need to stop mimicking the KMT as well.

More later today.

[Taiwan]

Wow! That was certainly a blast with no uncertainty. Taiwan took a huge step backward yesterday, all the way back to before 2000. Lots of people have written over the years that Taiwanese are committed to their democracy and love it. That will now be put to the test. The KMT-dominated legislature has repeatedly attempted to hollow out institutions such as the Central Election Commission. That will now be possible. Will it be carried out, and will it be stopped? I'm betting that the answers to those questions are yes and no.

The canned stories are coming out in the international media. It's wearying to see the same crap -- the NYTimes again refered to Ma as a "Harvard-educated lawyer." Note that there were no reports of post-election violence, something only associated with the KMT. Nonetheless, we're certain to see those reports saying Taiwan elections are "marred by controversy"....

A couple of things. I was always maintaining optimism -- why not? no one else was! :) -- but it was two months ago, at the first rally in Taichung, that I first privately concluded we were going to lose (didn't foresee the magnitude of the blast, though! More on that later...). I went there, as I told some friends later, to get religion, and I most emphatically didn't. Intead of becoming more enthusiastic about the outcome, I became less. The presentation was lackluster and formulaic, relying on stuff that was old and the stroking of emotions and themes from previous campaigns. Every speech was in Taiwanese, except part of one (KMT rallies offer a mix). My kids sat there bored, addressed by people who couldn't be bothered to find a way to talk to the two Taiwan citizens I am raising. The DPP campaign, as I have noted, has been lackluster since day one -- the bounce I expected never came, I never felt the electricity -- the Ma team ran a better campaign, in almost every way -- more cash, better ads, better responses to issues as they arose, better talking points, and better handling of the media. And not too much Taiwanese. Very well done. Ma's victory shows that if Lien hadn't mailed in his campaign in 2004, or Ma or Soong had run instead, then Chen would have been a one-term president.

I bet, if anyone ever does the surveys (this being Taiwan no one ever will) that it was Ma who benefited from the Tibet issue the most. It gave him the opportunity to look and talk tough, when he needed to.

Many things were symptomatic. Went to a meeting of FAPA, the main pro-Taiwan group in the US, in Taipei on Thursday. It was painful to watch. Sometimes I contemplate taking out ROC citizenship, but the brave new world they advocate doesn't include me or my children -- and if a strong supporter like me gets that vibe, how then the young on the street who chatter in a delightfully liquid lingo that is predominately Mandarin, with leaven of Taiwanese and English? Every person at the FAPA meet was older than I, and they were speaking Taiwanese. Not one speaker or two, but Every. Single. One. As I listened to a bunch of speeches in a language I didn't understand -- every word reinforcing my overwhelming alienness, one of the photographers standing next to me turned to camera guy next to him and remarked, rhetorically: "Why are they speaking that language? I don't understand a word they are saying!" Not one of those people took the time to compose and deliver their speech in Mandarin, a language spoken by everyone in the room -- and, mind you, a language understood by the people they most urgently need to communicate with: the Chinese. Of course there was no English, the language of the international media. Brilliant to hold a press event in a language the press don't speak. Yes, Mandarin is the language of the hated colonialist KMT. Yes, Mandarin was imposed at gunpoint. But if you want people to listen to you, you have to speak their language. For all its gaping flaws and debased values, the KMT offers this multiethnic island a multiethnic vision. The DPP and its supporters still do not.

Another thing -- the atmosphere in Taipei is nightmarish. Never again will I spend an election there -- the conventional wisdom is totally out of touch with the reality of the electorate. In 2004 I stayed in Taichung and got a pretty good line on what would happen, but not this time. I used to describe what circulates in Taipei as a cloud cuckoo-land of KMT talking points, but even that isn't right -- I lack a good grip on the kind of language to characterize its vast and all-encompassing wrongness. As reporters were churning out articles saying that the election was going to be tight Ma win, as speakers everywhere were retreating to positions of nervous ambiguity, and people talking to both campaigns said it would be tight, voters were preparing to hand Ma a 17 point victory. On Friday the DPP was saying it was seeing a late surge for Frank Hsieh, which I didn't report because it so obviously reeked of lying spin. But some apparently did. Nobody I talked to in the capital even got a whiff of a 17 point Ma victory, though all thought he'd win. Certainly somebody knew, because there were massive capital inflows into Taiwan in the last week before the election as international capital prepared to hollow out Taiwan like a gourd invest in our fine nation in anticipation of a Ma victory. Ironically, the nearest polls were the nutcase polls in the pro-Ma papers, though a close examination will show they were nowhere near correct either.

Voter patterns! I'll have a full discussion on them later this week. One thing that really really really stands out here is the desperate need for thorough, credible, detailed survey work that is reliable through time. Tomorrow's analyses in Taipei are going to be largely groups of people talking without the numbers to back them up.

I'm burnt out and heartsick, and I am going to take a few days off from blogging. Enjoy yourselves.

Banged around Taipei visiting events. Came back to Yungho to find a miniature parade for Frank Hsieh marching around the residential areas there.

Of course, not everyone was focused on what they were supposed to be doing. Take AP, for example: they recommend that Taiwan's electorate, take two Xanax. Yes, Ma Ying-jeou, a calming figure:

Ma Ying-jeou isn't a charismatic figure. He calms rather than inspires. He's a soft spoken administrator who promises to govern by consultation.

Aren't you reassured? And strangely for foreign media, they assert Ma is not charismatic -- that's in case you were confused by all the other foreign media pieces that assured readers Ma is indeed charismatic (NPR, IHT, Economist, to name a tiny few). It's actually not that bad, and even spends a few paragraphs establishing that Ma is a wuss, but they blow their chance about halfway down:

Ma has another weapon in his armory _ a Mr.-Clean reputation.

After Chen's bare-knuckled and allegedly corrupt rule, 57-year-old Ma, who has a doctorate in law from Harvard, is presenting himself as an exemplar of integrity with a track record of fighting corruption even in his own party.

No mention of being indicted for stealing money nobody was disputing was actually in his private accounts, or that his defense was "everybody does it." Isn't it great that you can spend a career in opposition to democracy and still be Mr. Clean? Ah, well.

That ubiquitous symbol of speed, modernity, and successful government projects, the high speed rail, puts in an appearance.

Readers are probably aware that the US has put a couple of carriers into the area to deter....whatever. I was told that a US-based academic said that there could be more to the deployment than meets the eye. Hope not.

Jeeps are the vehicle of choice for politics.

Religion and politics, mixed again. On my list of top 5 things I never want to hear a newbie under-25 foreigner say, "Taiwanese don't care about religion" is right up there with "I'm here to teach critical thinking."

They say that when you are badly injured, your body floods with endorphins, your brain shorts out, and you simply accept what happens with a sort of existential joy.

That is what watching Taiwanese politics is like.

In addition to mysterious people from the tropics, there were clowns.

And fan dancers.

In Hell the man who invented megaphones is locked in the room with 1,000 of them, all blaring 1,000 different covers of Carpenter songs.

When I came home my father in law was growling at me that no one in Yungho was Green, but there were plenty of people out there proving him wrong.

Traffic came to a standstill.

Beneath an ad for the Other Team, the parade vanishes into the distance....

And the neverending traffic surges into the gap....

[Taiwan]

You keep reading 'em, I'll keep churning 'em out....

Jon Adams, the local correspondent who has been turning out some really high quality stuff recently, visited Kinmen this week to take a peek at the future of Taiwan-China relations....

Direct cross-strait travel is largely prohibited because of the decades-old standoff between Taiwan and China. But here in Kinmen, Chinese tourists visit freely and Taiwanese businessmen can ferry across the strait to the mainland.

The Kinmen model will be expanded to all of Taiwan if either of the two candidates in the Taiwan's presidential election Saturday has his way. Their only argument is over the speed and scale at which that should happen.

For behind all the boisterous rallies and China-bashing rhetoric across Taiwan in recent days, this election is not about the usual hot-button issue of unification with, or independence from, China – neither of which is in the cards anytime soon.

Rather, it's about how economically close Taiwan should be with its giant neighbor. Will it be an uneasy handshake or a passionate embrace?

Either way, the candidates' willingness to engage rather than confront Beijing signals a pause in Taiwan's independence push and the likely cooling of a long-simmering Asian flash point.

"No matter who wins, we'll move closer to China," says Lin Wen-cheng, a China expert at National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung and a former adviser to two Taiwan presidents. "Cross-strait relations are going to improve."

Adams' work contains a significant improvement over that of other foreign media workers here: no quotes from taxi drivers. I'm not sure that people are "voting their pocketbooks" as Adams structures it -- people in Taiwan are not making a choice between an economic future and no economic future. Rather, they are making a choice about what kind of economic future they want, as well as rendering a verdict on Ma Ying-jeou -- far more so than Frank Hsieh.


Ted Galen Carpenter has a piece on the Taiwan election in the Wall Street Journal. You may remember him around last year claiming that Taiwan was "free riding" on the US defense agreements. Some highlights of his current work:

Ma Ying-jeou's impending victory in Taiwan's presidential election Saturday promises to usher in a period of relative calm in the island's turbulent relations with mainland China. Mr. Ma's Kuomintang Party is determined to end the bold and provocative policies that President Chen Shui-bian has pursued toward Beijing over the past eight years. Beijing and Washington will both be relieved to have a government committed to preserving the status quo in the Taiwan Strait rather than pushing the envelope on a transition from de facto to de jure independence.

It's funny to read people in Washington claim that Chen was "pushing the envelope" when people in Taipei are claiming what he did was no real use. Carpenter's claim of Ma's impending victory is also an eyebrow raiser, but I doubt he reads my blog, and so is stuck with the Ma's Going to Cruise! propaganda of yesteryear. Still, an admirably succinct presentation of the Establishment view that Chen is a problem for the status quo. All honor to Carpenter for saying later that the missile build-up is provocative....

Beijing has an opportunity to maintain the momentum toward peace and stability, but it remains to be seen whether Chinese leaders will be wise enough to seize the moment. President Chen's strategy of antagonizing Beijing by such measures as substituting "Taiwan" for "China" in the names of state-run corporations, purging most Chinese history from Taiwanese school textbooks, and seeking admission to the United Nations under the name "Taiwan" understandably made sensible Taiwanese nervous, but Mr. Ma must show that his more subtle and conciliatory approach will reduce tensions and bring tangible benefits.

Ever notice how Libertarians writing on Taiwan sound just like Beijing writing on Taiwan, only more so? Carpenter neglects to note that Chen was just returning "Taiwan" to names that had been "Taiwan" historically -- like the shipbuilding corporation and the post office. Note the underlying accusation that Chen is irrational -- "sensible people" were made nervous by him. Mad Chen^(tm) lives! Nothing is ever said about Beijing's irrational behavior -- antagonizing Taiwan with threats, refusing to speak to the DPP, and so on. It's ironic to look at the language Carpenter uses, and then mentally frame a picture of Chinese troops killing Tibetans. Who are the irrational people in this equation? Chen doesn't make me nervous. Americans serving Beijing and saying that democracy supporters are irrational -- those make me manic, however.

After arguing that Beijing should not give the DPP ammo to use against Ma by continuing the missile buildup, Carpenter then notes:

...Republic of China (Taiwan's official name) has now dwindled to 23 mostly small nations in Africa and the Caribbean. There was some logic to Beijing's strategy when President Chen repeatedly adopted measures to assert Taiwan's sovereignty and separate national identity. Chinese officials wanted to demonstrate to Taipei that such conduct was counterproductive and would only increase Taiwan's diplomatic isolation. The same consideration motivated China's effort to exclude Taiwan from membership in international bodies, including even relatively apolitical ones like the World Health Organization.

Beijing was not responding to Chen, but strategically moving into Africa and Central America to capitalize on opportunities in countries that have FTAs with the US, and to dislodge the US from its position in those areas. It is wrong to perceive the Chinese moves in the China-Taiwan context -- that is just cover.

This is, of course, just another way of blaming Chen for perceived foreign policy failures. It is funny that people complain about the DPP's loss of diplomatic recognition, when the reality is that the KMT lost far more nations than the DPP has, and that the Chinese could easily buy the remainder if they wanted, for I have heard what Taiwan pays. But they won't, because one of the props of that virtual state, the ROC, is recognition by other nations. Without that, Taiwan would become.... alone or, to use another word: independent...

Carpenter correctly notes that nobody in Taiwan supports annexing the island to China, and thus argues that Beijing should not pressure the KMT to annex the island to China -- not because that would be a bad thing mind you, but because it would undermine the Great Mr. Ma. He concludes that the ball is in China's court -- it should stop bullying Taiwan -- not because bullying is wrong, but because that would be bad for relations with a Ma Ying-jeou-run Taiwan. Even when the Establishment advocates something sensible, it is for the wrong reasons.... *sigh* It does appear from this piece, however, that it is widely understood that a Ma presidency does not mean that the Taiwanese have given up on independence.

[Taiwan]

Friend calls me today: there's a concert for Tibet at 9:00. Am I going? Certainly, I explained. I'm going to need a new lost cause after this election....

....no, seriously, after months of hearing how Ma was going to blow away Hsieh (and hearing people laugh in my face when I mentioned the possibility of a Hsieh win), everyone is now nervously moving into the "too close to call" position. I'd be laughing my ass off, but being up here in Taipei has me completely strung out on coffee and chocolate muffins. I've been carefully testing them at every Starbucks to make sure they are of the same high standard everywhere, but I still am a few short of the thirty needed to satisfy Central Limit Theorem....

1:30 ...my wife calls to complain about Ma's ridiculous claims that the Greens are going to have him blown up with a suicide bomber...."Hope nobody does anything!" she says crossly. One of the Blue neighbors came around to our house to complain that she had to go too far to vote, a thought my wife worked assiduously to encourage, she said. My wife is a Tibetan Buddhist, and said that at the Thursday night meeting last night, her Lama gave a talk on events in Tibet and the sad history of Chinese colonialism there. It obviously had an effect. All over Taiwan, this week, dozens of gurus are giving similar talks.....

[Taiwan]

A 3-D presentation at the 2-28 Museum shows the spread of the revolt across Taiwan in early March of 1947.

First, moment of humor, courtesy of my friend Sponge Bear. For some reason raving China apologist Gregory Clark still gets space in the Japan Times, and he has another one of his excuses for murdered Tibetans today:

"As for Tibetan independence, people forget that the strongest opponent was the Western-backed Nationalist Chinese government that ended up in Taiwan. Beijing simply inherited that Western-approved situation."

...Keith Bradsher had another sturdily sound article in the NYTimes about Taiwan and Tibet, which I understand made the front page, even. Bradsher opens by pointing out that the race has tightened:

China’s suppression of protests in Tibet and missteps by the opposition Nationalist Party have made the Taiwanese presidential election on Saturday an unexpectedly close race. What once seemed to be an insuperable lead for the Nationalist candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, has narrowed considerably, politicians and political analysts said.

A narrow victory for Mr. Ma would give him a weaker mandate for his goal of closer economic relations with mainland China. An actual defeat for Mr. Ma, now a possibility although not yet the most likely outcome, would be a serious setback for Beijing officials, who have cultivated relations with the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, over the past four years.

It must be a jolt for anyone who has read the "Ma will cruise" propaganda that has oozed like black ichor out of the KMT papers and into the international media. [smug]Readers of this blog already knew it would be close.[/smug] Still, at this late date, everyone one both sides is saying the same thing -- Ma in a tight one.

Only one sour note in Bradsher's piece:

President Chen won re-election then partly because of the sympathy he received when he was lightly wounded in a shooting while campaigning on the eve of voting.

As I've pointed out countless times, no credible evidence supports this position -- Chen had already drawn even in the polls by this time. Yet here it is, like gospel, solemnly intoned. What is it about nonsense that gives it such a long half-life?

Speaking of nonsense, a longtime local expat here flipped me his letter to the Canadian writer of the piece I blogged on earlier this week:

As a Canadian who has made his home in Taiwan for the better part of two decades, I must say I was appalled at the lack of knowledge and understanding your article "Scores of Taiwanese-Canadians travel for vote" displayed. Have you ANY idea about what you're writing, or do you make it up as you go along?

1. You said "Under current law, all Taiwanese citizens must travel to their registered precincts to vote." That is not true. Voting is not mandatory.
2. You said "The island state is officially administered under the Republic of China but is in practice autonomously governed." Your sentence should read "The Republic of China, better known as Taiwan, is an island state that is autonomously/independently self-governed.
3. You said "The issue continually at the forefront of domestic debates is whether it should formally declare its independence." That is not true. Declaring formal independence has not been brought up in this year's debates. Where did you get this information?
4. You parenthetically added to James Chou's quote: "About half of the people support the (People's Republic of China) and the other half has very strong grassroots emotions about the land of their ancestors." Where did you get the impression that ANYONE in Taiwan supported the PRC? Your parenthetical insert should have been the Republic of China, not the People's Republic of China. There's a big difference and while it's understandable for a layperson to be confused, it's unforgivable for a professional journalist to not know the difference.

Please, do your readers the courtesy of due diligence before writing about countries of which you have scant knowledge.

I blogged on that bit about supporting China below, but ignored the rest of that surpassingly stupid article. Good catch, man.

Ma dominates the foreign media. In addition to this short piece this week from Cox News that gives Ma good publicity and blames Chen for cross-strait tension, there was a long, in-depth piece in Time this week that attracted much attention and a large number of emails to my mailbox.

I cannot give details, but the pro-Ma slant of the Time piece was inevitable given the massive DPP fuckup with the Time reporter, who wanted to do a similar piece on Hsieh. It was pure banana republic. In several years of watching the DPP's mishandling of the foreign media, that one really stood out. So don't blame Time, except for the usual nonsense I'll touch on below. Onward to the piece....

First, there are the usual errors: speaking of the half-life of nonsense...

Ma believes the time for change has come. Squished into his train seat, the Harvard-educated lawyer outlined to TIME a detailed program that he hopes will broaden Taiwan's relations with China and eventually lead to real peace.

When will the light dawn? Ma never passed the bar, and never practiced law. He's not a lawyer. Darwin was soooooo right: bad facts never die.

The Time piece also quotes Philip Yang, whom readers will know from long experience is pro-KMT, and is, according to a recent NYTimes piece, acting as advisor to the Ma campaign:

"We tried to help our sense of Taiwan identity, but it resulted in self-marginalization in the region," says Philip Yang, a political scientist at National Taiwan University in Taipei. As a result, "we believe Taiwan is losing its edge, losing its advantages and losing its chance at long-term prosperity."

Note that in the pro-KMT construction of Yang, marginalization of Taiwan is entirely the result of Taiwan's actions. Beijing is not an actor. [Broken record]Observe that Time does not identify the political affiliation of Yang.[/broken record]

The Time piece didn't do too bad a job of handling the economy, pointing out that the massive investments in China render claims that the economy sucks problematic, but all the quotes are pro-KMT. Again, they couldn't help it, the DPP totally fumbled the ball on this opportunity. And remember, this is a piece about Ma; it is inevitably slanted toward his opinions. There is a section on the DPP -- with counterbalancing comments. But the reporter still believes that the "landslide victory" in the legislative elections was due to being fed-up with Chen, though no evidence supports that view. *sigh*

However, all honor to Time for these two paragraphs that show how Ma's slippery claims on sovereignty bump up against China's obdurate insistence on annexing Taiwan:

But there's a catch. Hu insisted that any negotiating party had to accept Beijing's view of "one China," a prerequisite even the KMT might have trouble swallowing. An overtly friendly Taipei will also force Hu to make sensitive decisions on Taiwan policy he has so far been able to avoid, and it is uncertain how far he's willing to go. "Taiwan's leadership will be looking for concessions and will almost certainly be willing to make concessions of its own." says Shelley Rigger, a Taiwan expert at Davidson College in North Carolina. "That will force Beijing to decide: Where do we draw the line?"

Yet Ma's biggest stumbling block might well be the ambivalent feelings of his own people toward China. Fear of domination by China is still widespread among Taiwan's population and Ma might have to tread carefully or risk a backlash. Even those in favor of closer relations, like Kaohsiung's Wayne Lee, harbor lingering fears of the consequences. "We have to ask ourselves if it is worth making a lot of money for 10 years and trading away our sovereignty," he says.

If only the reporter had caught how sovereignty for Ma really means the Republic of China, not Taiwan.


But that's not the issue of this blog post. No, the topic of this post is the colossal failure of the English-language foreign media to discuss Ma's background. We are 24 hours from the election and not one piece I have seen this year has mentioned Ma's emergence from the KMT security state. In the entire run up to the election over the past seven months there has been only one. The potentially excellent media narrative of Frank Hsieh the democracy activist vs. Ma Ying-jeou the lifelong democracy opponent -- his defense of martial law in public correspondence, including long prison sentences for dissidents, his opposition to democracy, his opposition to the lifting of martial law, his opposition to the repeal of the notorious Article 100 -- was completely blown off by the foreign media. Even when Hsieh is correctly presented Ma is ignored: Caroline Gluck of the BBC had an otherwise nicely balanced piece the other day that mentions Hsieh's background as a democracy activist -- but not Ma's as a democracy opponent.

No excuse exists -- this has been covered in the local media quite extensively -- Gerrit van Der Wees' recent piece in the Taipei Times being only the latest example. It's out there in books and many different documents -- credible allegations that Ma was a student spy, for example, have been circulating in the democracy community for years and in print since Taiwangate in the early 1990s, where current EPA minister Winston Dang [Chen] alluded to them in the introduction. It's been a theme on this blog, which I know is read by working media people.

The international media has comprehensively failed both Taiwan and its own readers.

Why? I think Jim Mann was on to something.....

Consider, for example, this NYT piece on Putin from 2000:

Mr. Putin, who became prime minister of Russia only last August, has suddenly come to power from relative obscurity at the young age of 47. His resume's bare bones -- including his service in the K.G.B.'s foreign intelligence arm and his role as director of its successor, the Federal Security Service -- are known.

Putin's connection to the Russian security forces are forthrightly described. But in case the reader imagines this is because Russia is great and powerful, it is not difficult to find similar pieces for the Baltic states or Poland. When Arnold Ruutel ran for President of Estonia, the media said clearly that he was head of the Estonian Supreme Soviet (where he apparently worked for Estonian independence). Similarly this NYT article on the former Francoist Manuel Fraga Iribane identifies Fraga as a Francoist:

Mr. Fraga, though, is not one to apologize for his Francoist past. ''You can't treat everyone over a 40-year period in the same way,'' he said. ''Everyone knew that I was a reformist. I think few people did more than me to carry out the transition. I have maintained my ideas all along, always looking for agreement.''

The issue is not the current and former stances of politicians -- it is that the past of Ma Ying-jeou has completely vanished from the foreign media, whereas similar anti-democracy pasts of European politicians are generally put on display, whatever their current positions. Yet Ma is treated completely differently....

....I think Mann was on to something when we wrote that dissidence in the Soviet sphere had cachet for westerners, but dissidence in the Chinese sphere does not. And I think the Taiwan election coverage by the foreign media has completely vindicated his position.

[Taiwan]