Editorial: Ma Ying-jeou running soft and hard

Looking beyond the pro-unification media’s depiction of president-elect Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) as a deity sent to rescue Taiwan from pro-independence scoundrels, we can see that Ma is making some effort to reach out to former foes and bridge ideological divides.

On Wednesday Ma met a hospitalized Bo Yang (柏楊) — one of many White Terror victims of Ma’s former employer and idol, Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國). In the 1960s, already on notice for embarrassing the military and other establishment figures in his writings, Bo was imprisoned over a translation of a Popeye cartoon that depicted the spinach-munching sailor and his adopted son Swee’Pea squabbling over who should rule an island that they happened upon.

Bo’s family was torn apart by his imprisonment. But since his release, he has emerged as a champion of human rights and a lacerating critic of Chinese culture. He put aside his short fiction and concentrated on polemical material such as The Ugly Chinaman, as well as translations of classical works into modern Chinese. More recently, Bo has been chairman of Amnesty International in Taiwan.

What made Bo’s case interesting was that he is a Mainlander who fled to Taiwan with most of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) establishment. The sight of Ma grasping the hand of this cultural iconoclast — now in his late 80s — was intriguing. It brought to mind the massive posters that Ma displayed on the outside of the former KMT headquarters a few years back that aimed to rehabilitate prominent victims of KMT rule.

This is Ma’s soft and flexible side. It is a demeanor that has helped him win over ordinary people in the face of hostility from party hardliners who at one time would have had Bo Yang executed.

On Thursday, however, Ma’s harder, more intractable side emerged with the news that the Presidential Office could be moved to Guandu (關渡) on the outskirts of Taipei City because of the current building’s Japanese heritage.

There is no compelling reason why the Presidential Office building deserves to be retained as home base for the head of state. The argument by academic Chen Fang-ming (陳芳明) — music to Ma’s ears — that the building represents a continuing stain on the national consciousness because of its Japanese connection is overstated, however, and not just because the KMT spent an equal amount of time imposing colonial rule on Taiwan from inside its walls.

Ma’s interest in the matter can only be ideological, which means it will be difficult to offer justification for the vast expense that would result from making the move. There are also security considerations: At first glance it is unclear how Guandu might provide a more secure location for a presidential compound if it were to come under Chinese attack.

Ma has yet to be inaugurated, but he has already moved to consolidate the symbolic agenda. For now this process has had few obstacles, particularly because Ma makes a point of displaying a common touch — a lesson learned well from Chiang Ching-kuo — and has won over numerous people who were nominally “deep green” in their political orientation.

But after his election victory honeymoon ends, the conflict between his disgust at Taiwan’s Japanese legacy, for example, and his desire to be all things to all people — including nominal foes and victims of the Greater China mindset — will likely generate concern among his hardline colleagues that he is straying from the KMT’s mission. If Ma then heeds the hardliners after disarming people such as Bo Yang, the goodwill he has cultivated may turn bad very quickly indeed.