On Jan. 26, President Chen Shui-bian (
After his appointment was announced, Hsieh gave interviews to various media outlets and spoke of his ideas for the new administration. During the interviews, Hsieh said the new Cabinet is a "Cabinet of negotiation" that will not push ahead with changing the national title, and will recognize that the Constitution supports a "one China" interpretation.
Hsieh's remarks have become a topic of heated debate and even provoked a backlash within the green camp, members of which fear that Hsieh is pandering to the enemy and weakening his own position as a result.
After People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) returned to Taiwan from his trip to the US, the pan-blue ticket of Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-ping (
The cross-strait charter flights for the upcoming Lunar New Year holidays began a few days ago, breaking fresh ground for the cross-strait relationship at a time when Chen was on an official trip to Palau and Hsieh's new Cabinet was poised to begin addressing the challenges confronting the new administration.
Hsieh faces three major challenges. First, he has to deal with the proposal for cross-party reconciliation. Second, he has to define the implementation of cross-party cooperation, which will be a new experience for both the DPP and the pan-greens.
Even simply imagining the formulation of a possible DPP-PFP coalition is difficult. The pan-blue Wang-Chung ticket for the Legislative Yuan Speakership election has now been elected. In a mood of defeat, it's possible the green camp might again take up a cutthroat approach in dealing with the pan-blues -- an approach they are familiar with.
Changing the political culture is the greatest challenge facing the Hsieh Cabinet. In the past, the question of political victory or defeat was actually quite simple: he who had the majority was elected president. But in Chen's second term, political victory or defeat will depend on the effectiveness of policy implementation.
In the case of non-stop flights across the Strait, it was not important who proposed them: the key was whether or not the DPP government had a policy that balanced Taiwan's sovereignty with cross-strait talks.
Also, it remains to be seen whether the pan-blue dominated legislature can, by virtue of having won the legislative speaker post and through the Control Yuan's exercise of its right to consent, be tamed into becoming a platform for fluid cross-party alliances.
The concept of such a platform is not easy to grasp, as there is no objective standard to help define it. To take the situation from the DPP's perspective as an example, one would imagine that they would prefer a DPP-PFP combination, rather than the current one, consisting of a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) member and one from the PFP. The immediate risk of a DPP-PFP combination would be that the PFP would simply disintegrate.
Without Soong, the political situation would merely revert back to a stand-off between the blues and greens, and it is unlikely that the DPP would wish for this eventuality.
As a result, although the Wang-Chung ticket's success in taking the legislative speaker posts might seem to be a setback for the DPP, it is actually a victory for the multi-party system. The relative merits of victory and defeat can only be judged from the perspective of the big picture. In this light, we can see how a short-term victory could lead to the parties sinking deeper into conflict.
A second challenge for Hsieh's Cabinet is the media's belief that the breakthrough over non-stop flights to China for the Lunar New Year holidays has initiated a thaw in cross-strait relations.
However, with Beijing's enactment of an anti-secession law due next month, it is no longer a question of whether or not the law will be passed, but a question of how much latitude it will offer.
Cross-strait relations, then, are soon to move into the "anti-secession law" era. Looking at the cross-strait flights and the possibility of similar flights in the future from this perspective, it is clear that this will certainly have long-term political, economic and socio-cultural implications for Taiwan.
The "anti-secession law" and the flights have now become the new issues of the cross-strait situation, Hsieh will have to balance both domestic and international demands on the issue, and show that he is on top of the "one China" principle.
When Jia Qinglin (
The international media believes that Jia's comments are a softening of unification rhetoric, rather than marking any fundamental change in position.
Therefore, it is the "anti-secession law" that is the real bone of contention, and it brings external pressure to bear on Taiwan's political parties to come to an understanding. This pressure to annex Taiwan transcends party divisions, and the real test of the Hsieh Cabinet's abilities will be whether it can establish a cross-party platform outside the legislature to manage cross-strait issues.
Finally, there is the need to establish public trust. Chen's first term can be said to be a period of conquest, and the achievement of this period was winning over half the vote in last year's presidential election, when his share of the vote increased by 1.5 million.
In this second term, the DPP's goal is not to be the largest single political party in the legislature, but to increase its list of administrative achievements.
This will include a shift in Taiwan's democratic politics to a phase of democratic competition. Hsieh's Cabinet has to show that the DPP, apart from being able to win votes, is also able to win hearts and minds. This is at the core of Taiwan's competitiveness.
Creating a new model for cross-party cooperation, responding to changes in the cross-strait situation, and winning the hearts and minds of the people are the three great challenges facing the Hsieh Cabinet.
How the Cabinet meets these challenges will be an indication of whether the DPP has the ability to maintain its rule for any length of time.
Hsu Yung-ming is an assistant research fellow at the Sun Yat-sen Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy at the Academia Sinica.
Translated by Daniel Cheng, Paul Cooper and Ian Bartholomew
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