TAIPEI - Taiwan's Chinese Nationalist Party or
Kuomintang (KMT) is not like other parties in other
places. Other parties reward promise and punish failure.
For them, electoral viability is paramount. When a
leader, no matter how successful, becomes a liability -
think of Britain's Conservatives and Margaret Thatcher -
decapitation is swift and brutal.
But not for
the KMT. Perhaps it is the party's history that, for
more than 40 years managed, like Chinese writer Lu Xun's
fictional character Ah Q, to interpret the most
humiliating defeats, always ascribed to the malice of a
third party, as moral victories. Being kicked out of
China was, in the official version, due to the malice of
the Soviet Union, but also so it might have great
success in Taiwan. Being kicked out of the United
Nations was, in fact, a voluntary withdrawal that upheld
the nation's pride, and so on.
This
characteristic thinking could be seen in operation in
March, when the KMT lost its second presidential
election in a row. The party's response was to accuse
the government and some 200,000 temporary election
officials - most of whom were, in fact, supporters of
the KMT or its ally, the People First Party (PFP) - of
massive electoral fraud. Its reasons for saying this
were that internal party polls suggested it ought to win
the election. It also suggested that President Chen
Shui-bian had had himself shot in the stomach the day
before the election to gain a sympathy vote. Once again,
from the ashes of defeat, the KMT managed to produce the
myth of, if not victory, then at least a righteousness
that had simply been frustrated by the malice and
dishonesty of others.
The KMT's Ah Qism has been
useful to its past leaders - for example, Chiang
Kai-shek remained a "great man" in Taiwan long after the
rest of the world knew him to be an incompetent crook.
It is also useful to its current head, Lien Chan. Lien
is, at the moment, currently on what he terms a
"thanksgiving tour" of Taiwan, to visit grassroots party
organizations, ostensibly to thank them for their
efforts in the election campaign last winter. Unguarded
comments from party officials, however, suggest that
Lien is, in fact, trying to rally the troops for a
re-run of the presidential election, which he expects to
take place next spring.
Lien believes that
Taiwan's courts will eventually declare the March 20
election invalid. The problem for his party is that that
nobody else thinks this. The re-count will not overturn
the election result, nor is it likely that, on the basis
of the evidence of minor administrative errors that the
KMT has, or at least has made public, the courts will
order a new election. More important, the public is sick
to death of squabbling about the election, and a recent
poll suggest that support for the KMT-PFP has dropped by
10%, one fifth of their support, in the last three
months. That might not matter so much were it not for
the fact that elections for the legislature, where the
KMT and PFP have, between them, a paper-thin majority,
are to be held in December.
Dumping Lien and
rethinking its ideology The dilemma for the party
is that in order to make itself electorally viable, it
has to dump its leader and rethink its ideology. But
there is no mechanism for bringing about the first of
these objectives and there is no consensus either on how
to go about the second, or what the results of such a
reorientation should be. None of this is helped by the
machinations of the PFP, which is ruthlessly trying to
exploit its partner's disarray for its own ends.
Dumping Lien is both urgent and impossible. It
is urgent because Lien is now a three-time loser. He has
lost two presidential elections and in 2001 took the
party to its most humiliating performance in legislative
elections ever. But Lien will not go while rulings on
the legal challenges to the March 20 election are still
pending. Lien's supporters in the party elite, many of
them former students of Lien from his days as a
university professor, argue that were he to take
responsibility for the defeat, and then find himself
having to re-fight the election, his campaign would be
seriously damaged.
This is true, but since the
chances of another election are nugatory, less
sympathetic observers see Lien's obsession with the
legal cases as simply a justification for his clinging
to office amid a fear that, were he to leave, the legal
cases would be very quietly shelved.
Lien's
remaining at the helm, however, is a nightmare for the
KMT's legislators, who see his overt support for their
campaigns as a kiss of death. Some 10 sitting
legislators - the party has 66 - have already said they
will not run for re-election under KMT colors while Lien
remains chairman.
This is particularly ironic
since it is precisely because of the power that Lien
wields through the selection process for legislative
candidates that he has managed so far to keep a lid on
intra-party dissent. This selection process is totally
opaque and virtually any candidacy is within the power
of the party chairman to bestow. Lien can therefore
engineer candidate lists to reward friends and to punish
foes and critics.
This has not suppressed
dissent completely. There are legislators who have
adequate local power bases to be assured of winning a
seat, even as independents should the KMT drop them and
who therefore have nothing to fear from speaking out.
There are also high-level cadres with power bases
outside the legislature such as Ma Ying-jeou, the mayor
of Taipei City.
Young KMT members demand
party democracy And of course there are the
complaints of those who have been left out. Last Friday,
for example, a KMT grouping calling itself the 567
Alliance, consisting of younger party members impatient
with Lien's leadership, protested about the lack of
primaries to select candidates, seeing the current
system of "negotiation" simply as a way for the chairman
to reward loyalty and appoint his own placemen.
Realizing the opposition within his own party to
his continued leadership, Lien has been trying to shore
up his position by suggesting to the PFP, KMT's ally in
the failed election bid, that they should merge. In
fact, in May this was reported as a done deal; it was
not a question of if, just a matter of when. Over the
last month the deal has been on-again, off-again,
depending on which audience Lien was speaking to. As of
last weekend it was on again; Lien said a merger was the
eventual goal and some form of alliance for the December
elections a necessity.
Part of the problem with
the merger is that only half of Lien's party wants it.
The KMT is divided over Lien, but it is also split on
something more fundamental: what exactly does it stand
for?
The party has long been split between
traditionalists who believe in the old goals of Chinese
nationalism, the creation of a "greater Chinese" world
power, the stressing of Chinese culture over that of
Taiwan and the eventual reunification of Taiwan with
China, and a so-called "nativization" faction, which
sees China as a foreign country, believes in putting
Taiwan's interests first and is indifferent to the
question of reunification.
The two camps are not
split entirely along ethnic lines between mainlander
exiles of the Chiang Kai-shek era and their offspring,
and native Taiwanese, though it is fair to say that each
camp is dominated by a particular ethnic group.
Under the chairmanship of Lee Teng-hui from 1988
to 2000 the nativized faction came, after bitter
internal feuding, to rule the roost. Since 2000, after
public demonstrations following Lien's first
presidential defeat led to Lee's resignation as chairman
- the vacant chairmanship then being filled by Lien, the
traditionalists have been ascendant. Lien has embraced
the KMT's version of the "one China" principle - that
Taiwan is a part of China, but not a part of the
People's Republic of China - and even waxed nostalgic
about the days before democracy "when there was hope",
while the party's policy, as exhibited in its
performance in the legislature, has often appeared to
have been scripted in Beijing.
It is hard to
understand why the KMT thought this traditionalism would
have resonance with Taiwanese voters, unless it is some
iron rule of politics that long-governing parties - the
KMT had, after all, been in power since 1945 - when
thrown out of office, must blame themselves for not
being "true to their roots".
Lien's path was
stony, littered with defeats And sure enough, the
proof that Lien's path was a stony one came in March.
Anti-Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidates had
won 60% of the vote in the 2000 presidential election -
that they failed to win the presidency was due to their
own lack of unity. In March they saw this slip by 10
percentage points. Given the fumbling performance of the
DPP government in the last four years, such a
performance was a devastating rejection. Moreover it was
specifically a rejection of the KMT.
The PFP is
basically an ethnic party that can rely on the vote of
mainlanders and ethnic Hakka who fear the chauvinism,
real or imagined, of the majority Hoklo-speaking
Taiwanese, which is, they think, promoted by the DPP.
These are iron votes.
The KMT, however, relies
on the votes of ethnic Taiwanese. Many of these used to
be put off by the DPP, partly for class reasons - they
saw the DPP as being too working class, and partly for
economic reasons - they thought the DPP too
redistributive, and its poor relations with China were
damaging to prosperity. They saw the KMT as the party
most likely to reserve the cross-Strait status quo,
neither too close to China nor too antagonistic.
But the party's lurch, under Lien's leadership,
toward strident unificationism and its flirtation with
Beijing over the past four years has alienated this
constituency. Given that this group craves stability
above everything, it should come as no surprise that in
the period immediately following the election,
characterized by massive protest demonstrations several
of which have turned violent, collective support for the
pan-blue opposition has dropped. This is a disaster
particularly for the KMT. The PFP's ethnic power base
actually likes a little mayhem, it sees it as showing
the right kind of fighting spirit needed to protect its
ethnic minority constituents' interests. It is the KMT,
the "safe" or "moderate" party that suffers from voters'
disgust with the pan-blues' post-election antics.
Not surprisingly, the younger elements of the
KMT want to reorient the party in a way that will allow
it to win back its Hoklo supporters. But how that might
be done is not at all clear. KMT Legislator Apollo Chen,
in a recent newspaper op-ed piece, pointed out that
reform must come from the ground up and must start by
hashing out a consensus on some important questions,
such as "Does the KMT still represent the Three
Principles of the People and five-power constitution?
After we abandon reconquering the mainland and unifying
China, where does our legitimacy come from?"
Thrashing out what the KMT stands
for "How can the hollowed-out core ideas appeal
to people and make them willing to sacrifice their lives
for them?" Apollo adds. "What is mainstream public
opinion? Is the rising Taiwanese consciousness an
awakened self-awareness? Or is it a sugar-coated Hoklo
chauvinism? Does the trend of 'localization'
comprehensively describe the current situation? Or is it
a biased representation? Is national identification
equal to ethnic identification? Is identity politics
itself an end or a means? ... How do we define the
Republic of China [ROC], the ROC 'in' Taiwan and that
the ROC 'is' Taiwan? And how should the ROC face
Taiwan?"
This is a rallying cry from a senior
legislator to thrash out the very basics of what the KMT
stands for. It is a cry to which Lien has, so far,
turned a deaf ear.
Some would-be reformers have
even suggested the KMT change its name to the Taiwan
Nationalist Party to show where its real identification
lies. Other thoughtful voices have wondered whether this
would just be turning the party into some form of
DPP-lite. On the other hand, DPP-lite might be just what
middle-of-the-road Taiwanese voters really want. The DPP
itself is much watered down in its ideological tone from
the days when the current president was a fire-breathing
young legislator, and has gained in popularity as a
result. But its problems with China remain unable to be
put off to many.
But the party brass isn't
listening. Instead it is trying to move ahead with the
merger with the PFP. For the "nativization" camp this is
something that cannot be allowed to happen, for by
merging, the KMT will marginalize itself toward a ghetto
of ethnic politics. After all, the one virtue of the KMT
is that it bestrides Taiwan's ethnic fault lines in a
way that none of the rest come close to doing. But the
PFP merger will result in either a purge of the
nativization faction - this is what PFP chairman James
Soong has already demanded - of the mass defection of
this camp, perhaps to the DPP, perhaps to form a new
party of its own. Either way, the party would
effectively disappear.
Currently, the party
looks like a pantomime horse. Its back legs don't seem
to follow its front legs and occasionally they have a
kicking fight between themselves.
One vice
chairman of the party, Vincent Siew, has both let it be
known he is leaving his post and has also started
convening groups to do some of the intellectual
spadework of party reform. Siew and his efforts appear,
however, to be disowned by Lien, who has nothing to
contribute to the reform effort except to frustrate it
by his determination to stay in place even if he has to
sell his party to the PFP to do so.
Lien might
well be able to hang on until the December legislative
elections. But what then? It is quite possible the KMT
will be beaten into third place both by the DPP and the
PFP. At that time, Lien will have to go. But will there
be anything left for his successor to inherit?
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