|
|
|
|
|
Dead heat election raises Taiwan
stakes
By Sreeram Chaulia
HSINCHU, Taiwan - With barely a month-and-half left before
Taiwan's crucial presidential election, the race is neck and
neck between incumbent president Ma Ying-jeou and the
leading opposition candidate, Tsai Ing-wen.
Televised presidential debates that begin this weekend will
likely add to the uncertainty. The only guarantee in this
exciting drama is that it is not over until the last voter
casts his or her ballot on January 14, 2012.
A regional divide is clear across Taiwan. Tsai's Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP) holds a clear edge in the southern
part of the country, which is less urbanized and more
agrarian in its economic base. A widely held perception is
that farmers have not benefited as much from President Ma's
eventful four-year term as the industrial belt up north,
where the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party can count on several
strongholds. The central region could in the end be
decisive, as it is believed by observers to be a swing area.
It is currently seeing a flurry of rallies by the KMT and
the DPP.
This presidential election was made more interesting by last
week's wildcard entry of veteran Taiwanese politician James
Soong, who created the People First Party (PFP) in 2000
after being expelled from the KMT. Opinion polls put Soong
support at around 10% and he has emerged as a major spoiler
for president Ma's re-election chances.
His charismatic oratorical skills may sway some undecided
voters in the television dustups, further queering the pitch
for Ma. While there is speculation he may eventually pull
out of the race, it may leave too little time for the
phlegmatic Ma to cover lost ground.
Given enormous foreign policy shifts enacted by Ma in his
first term as president, this election is also being watched
warily by major powers in the Asia-Pacific region. The
Japanese media are full of news reports about how mainland
China is meddling yet again in a Taiwanese election after
being convinced that "losing" Ma would be detrimental to
Chinese interests. As a competitor for regional influence
with China, Japan views the Taiwanese election as a litmus
test of how much deeper Beijing's reach will grow across the
Taiwan Straits, with a friendly regime such as Ma's in the
saddle for another four years.
Ma's pronouncements about signing a "peace accord" with
Beijing if he is re-elected have also triggered unease in a
region where China's march to hegemony is a frightful
prospect. This author met some advisers to the DPP
presidential campaign who, contrary to the general public
opinion, were confident that Tsai would win hands down
because "80% of Taiwanese people are afraid of losing their
distinct identity and independence to China and they know
that Ma is Beijing's Trojan Horse".
Observers say China is using subtle means to ensure Ma's
victory, contrary to previous elections where bigwigs of the
Chinese Communist Party openly issued threats if the
Taiwanese candidate they preferred was not elected. Two
levers that the mainland has deployed thus far are
agricultural imports and tourists. Given that Ma's weakness
lies in the southern parts of Taiwan where agriculture
predominates, China has stepped up buying produce on a
massive scale to alleviate grievances of the countryside and
make them feel good about Ma. The threat inherent in this
strategic import policy is that if Tsai wins, then Taiwanese
farmers cannot expect to enjoy the benefits of access to
China's humungous market.
With hordes of mainland Chinese tourists have poured into
Taiwan since travel liberalization policies enacted by the
Ma regime, Beijing has found another lever with which to
poke and reconfigure Taiwan's internal politics. Chinese
tourism in Taiwan follows strict itineraries set by Beijing
and commentators have noted that as the election nears, the
tourists are being channeled more into KMT bastions so as to
showcase the concrete international economic benefits of
siding with Ma.
City mayors have realized the wealth that tourist spending
brings and have pleaded for swarms of mainlanders. For the
DPP's voting base, the strategic manipulation of Chinese
tourist movements is an omen of economic stagnation to come
if they stick to Tsai's camp.
China is also said to be encouraging the one million-strong
Taiwanese business and investor community resident on the
mainland to use their money and ballots to return Ma. While
not all Taiwanese investors in China are KMT financiers or
advocates, many do fear the return of the DPP to power could
slow, if not destroy, the cross-Straits economic
interactions which have grown at a galloping rate under Ma.
Taiwan's business elite are still divided on the
presidential election, basing their attitudes on narrow
sectoral calculations of which industry is receiving
favorable treatment from the Ma administration and which one
has suffered from step fatherly policies. With China
accounting for 30% of Taiwan's total trade and also for an
estimated US$150 billion of private Taiwanese foreign
investment, the former does have the material means to make
a difference in a dead heat election.
The United States has thus far maintained a cautious
position on the presidential struggle, reflecting some of
the same anxieties of the Taiwanese people and other powers
in East Asia. Washington wishes not to get entangled in a
serious security flare up in the Taiwan Straits, but is at
the same time worried about Ma's chumminess with Chinese
leaders that might disturb the American strategic
architecture for the region.
The re-emphasized vigor with which Washington has engaged
with states in the Asia Pacific that challenge Chinese
hegemony has a direct impact on Taiwan's own ability to
remain an independent nation. Yet, Ma's government has not
taken any stand on the rising tensions among Vietnam, the
Philippines and China, even though these sovereignty
disputes are playing out with American involvement right in
Taiwan's vicinity.
One scholar this author spoke to recalled that Ma's academic
research at Harvard University was on territorial tussles in
East Asia, and that his position at that time was that the
Senkaku islands controlled by Japan and claimed by mainland
China actually belonged to Taiwan. Today, however, he keeps
mum on the provocations of the People's Liberation Army Navy
and is happy to minimally reiterate Taiwanese control of
Taiping, which is the largest of the hotly disputed Spratly
Islands.
Should the DPP's Tsai come to power, it is not very obvious
that she will steer cross-Straits relations back to the
confrontational era of past DPP regimes. The institutional
effect of Ma's embrace of China for the last four years has
been so overwhelming that a new dispensation in Taipei
cannot simply roll back all the economic and cultural
exchanges.
Tsai herself argues that she would establish "normal
relations" with China rather than the "special ties" that Ma
had championed. The DPP argues for balanced diversification
of Taiwan's economic relations with other Asian powers so as
to avoid the trap of political integration via goods and
services with mainland China. But KMT partisans have tried
to portray Tsai's advisers and political aides as rabid
anti-China forces who will ruin the economic gains of
trading and investing with the mainland if they are in
charge.
Come January 14, the world will see whether Ma's
much-vaunted "primacy of the economy over politics" proves
convincing enough for Taiwanese citizens. Crude
representations of Ma as a stooge of the Chinese or of Tsai
as a hardliner who will steer Taiwan back towards tensions
with China are flying around in the campaigning rhetoric for
the elections, but the accumulated foreign policy changes of
the last four years are such that they have altered the
ground realities and made engagement with China
irreversible.
If it were just a question of degrees of difference rather
than polarization between the two main parties on the China
question, then the world may breathe easier as the stakes of
the elections would then not be as critical. But given the
sharp policy turnarounds engineered by Ma when he was
elected in 2008, and the pressure from the grassroots faced
by Tsai to re-assert Taiwanese sovereignty against a looming
China, no foreign power is taking chances by just letting
the domestic politics of Taiwan play out and throw up a
winner.
Just as the 2012 American presidential elections and Chinese
Communist Party successions are determiners of world order
today, Taiwan's presidential contest has become a pivotal
one with ramifications for the overall nature of
Asia-Pacific international relations. Taiwan's voters would
wish that democracy as a process is the only winner of this
election, but Beijing, Washington and Tokyo would be
assessing who among the foreign players actually "won" on
January 14.
Sreeram Chaulia is Professor and Vice Dean of the
Jindal School of International Affairs in Sonipat, India. He
is the first B Raman Fellow for Geopolitical Analysis at the
strategic affairs think tank, the Takshashila Institution,
and the author of the recent book, International
Organizations and Civilian Protection: Power, Ideas and
Humanitarian Aid in Conflict Zones (IB Tauris, London)
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
All material on
this website is copyright and may not be republished in any form
without written permission.
© Copyright 1999 -
2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings), Ltd.
|
|
Head Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li
Yuen Street East, Central, Hong Kong
Thailand Bureau: 11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab
Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
|
|
|
