Tue, Jul 12, 2005 page8

• Editorial: KMT's dirty laundry aired again

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  So Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) is threatening to sue Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) over Ma's bribery allegations. We would hope Ma's reaction would be a Bart Simpson-like "eat my shorts." A more diplomatic approach might be the Microsoft-like "are you sure you want to continue with this action?"

  As the "official" bagman for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), there is any amount of dirt that can be leveled at Wang and most of it will stick. The problem for Ma is that Wang is known to be a powerful facilitator, a man who can get things done, for this very reason. To shine a close light on Wang will show up not just one bad apple but the linchpin of a perfectly rotten system, and it is by no means certain that exposing the KMT in such a way will endear Ma to its members.

  Yesterday saw another piece of mendacity from Wang, which cannot go without comment, when he told a group of supporters in Kaohsiung that he would be able to end the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) manipulation of ethnic bias in elections.

  The problem with this statement is that it is not the DPP which manipulated ethnic bias but the pan-blue camp. When the KMT arrived here from China it had a simple policy of excluding Taiwanese from power. When it realized that it would have to fill its thinning ranks with some Taiwanese, it adopted the age-old tactic of imperialism from the Romans to the British: divide and rule.

  The main opposition to the KMT's monopoly of power came from the Hoklo-speaking gentry, outraged at their exclusion from power on "their" island as well as the iniquities of the land-reform compensation system. The KMT was able to counter Hoklo demands for majority rule by manipulating ethnic difference to its advantage. Basically it intimated to Mainlanders that the Hoklo were ungrateful savages who would push them into the sea should the KMT ever lose power -- an opinion the vast majority retain to this day, hence their post-presidential election trauma.

  It also suggested to the Hakka that majority rule meant rule by the Hoklo, which, given three centuries of Hoklo-Hakka rivalry, would likely be detrimental to Hakka interests. Much the same pitch was made to the Aborigines for whom there was little love lost toward Hoklo or Hakka. The KMT's clever strategy was to make the native minorities believe that they would be very much worse off under majority rule, and only the KMT could guarantee some sort of level playing field between the different ethnicities.

  Such a strategy gave the KMT a lockhold on between 30 and 35 percent of the electorate, and in communities which, because of their more tightly knit nature, were actually rather more easy to mobilize than the Hoklo themselves, the KMT only needed the support of one in four. This it managed to do by playing the "class" card.

  It was central to the alien KMT's ideology, and the cultural indoctrination that succeeded "retrocession" that everything Taiwanese was crass and its own imposed culture was superior. Aspirational Taiwanese were encouraged to identify with the KMT's "metropolitan" and see anything rooted in a specifically Taiwanese identity as backward. Many of them did and do, resulting in wide middle-class Hoklo support for the KMT. It is, of course, false consciousness, in the Marxian sense, but none the less powerful for that.

  This KMT strategy worked well in the past and still does, though it is fraying a little at the cuffs. Every election campaign sees the KMT criticize the DPP for ethnic campaigning, not because the DPP has been doing anything of the sort, but really as a message to remind the minority voters of the "threat" majority rule might pose. It's a dirty little tactic, but then the KMT is a dirty little party.
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