Taiwan in Time: Nov. 28 to Dec. 4
Not many people’s lives change drastically when they are 38 years old.
Four months pregnant with her fifth child, Yu Chen Yue-ying (余陳月瑛) knew nothing about politics when she ran for the Taiwan Provincial Council in 1963 under the orders of her father-in-law, former Kaohsiung County commissioner Yu Teng-fa (余登發).
Photo: Hung Cheng-hung, Taipei Times
“I was not prepared at all,” she writes in the book, Memoir of Yu Chen Yue-ying (余陳月瑛回憶錄). “But the strange thing was that faced with such an important task, I did not panic.”
Yu Teng-fa , an independent politician, could not run because he had been dismissed from office and sent to prison in a scandal (Yu Chen writes that he was framed by the government). Because there were guaranteed seats for women in the assembly, Yu wanted to back a female candidate so that not all these seats would go by proxy to the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
“I believe that there must be competition for politics to improve,” Yu Teng-fa says in Yu Chen’s book. “I don’t think my son, daughter or daughter-in-law are better than others. It’s because I can’t find anyone brave enough to compete against the KMT.”
Photo: Su Fu-nan, Taipei Times
After much recruitment, Yu Teng-fa finally found a candidate to run for the assembly — but three days before the registration deadline, she withdrew due to family objections.
“That is why I was suddenly pushed into the role,” Yu Chen writes, as she admits that she won the top vote because of her father-in-law’s influence. But she did not expect that she would run for election and continue to win, remaining in public office for the next 30 years. And in 1985, she earned the distinction of being Taiwan’s first female county commissioner.
LEARNING ON THE FLY
Yu Chen says that her husband advised her to just stay quiet during the assemblies, but she writes that that was something she was “incapable of doing” — especially as part of the opposition.
“I was like a first-time student, I was taking notes and observing how other opposition politicians carried themselves,” she writes.
Her role model was fellow assemblywoman Hsu Shih-hsien (許世賢), who was Taiwan’s first female professor and would go on to become the country’s first female mayor in 1968.
“She always stood her ground and handled matters efficiently. She remained calm and was able to persuade people by reasoning,” Yu Chen writes. “In my 18 years as assemblywoman, I never insulted a politician. If you can’t force people to do things, you try other ways. Solving the problem is most important.”
“Through working for my constituents and seeking advice from my more experienced peers, I quickly learned the ropes of being a politician on my own,” she adds.
Yu Chen writes that she noticed the lack of true democracy in Taiwan during those days, and spoke out when the government decided to make village and borough chiefs appointed instead of elected. She also felt that the provincial government had too much power, and proposed that the provincial governor be elected as well.
She says she focused mostly on the basic problems of society, including farmers’ rights, election fraud and police abusing their power.
“I developed my political style during my first term,” she writes. “I stayed away from higher-level institutional problems, and did not try to fight ideological battles with government officials to highlight that I was part of the opposition. I worked for people’s welfare and their rights.”
Yu Chen ran for reelection in 1967 — this time on her own accord. She served a total of five terms in the assembly, then joined the legislature in 1983. She became Kaohsiung County commissioner in 1985 — following in the footsteps of her father-in-law and brother-in-law Huang You-jen (黃友仁), who were elected in 1960 and 1977, respectively.
The Yu family turned into a political dynasty as Yu Chen’s son, Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲) succeeded her for two terms and also served as legislator and interior minister. Yu Cheng-hsien’s wife, Cheng Kui-lien (鄭貴蓮), served as a legislator and in the National Assembly.
Yu Chen’s other son and daughter, Yu Cheng-tao (余政道) and Yu Lin-ya (余玲雅), both served in the provincial assembly and as legislators.
Yu Chen left politics for several years after finishing her second term as county commissioner, but in 2000 she was named a senior advisor to then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), although she resigned in 2003 due to a financial scandal, ending a political career that was not even supposed to have happened.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
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