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PRC encouraged tycoon to smear president

Chinese officials encouraged the fugitive former chairman of the Tuntex Group, Chen Yu-hao (陳由豪), to announce that he had made a donation of NT$10 million to President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) 2000 election campaign, a local Chinese-language magazine reported.

The latest issue of Win-Win Weekly reported that a group of mid-ranking officials at the Taiwan Affairs Council under the Chinese State Council suggested that the fugitive write letters to the Taiwanese media in a bid to derail the president's reelection campaign.

The officials told Chen Yu-hao that by doing so he would win favor among the authorities in Beijing, the magazine quoted a source close to him as saying.

Chen Shui-bian, in an interview with SET TV on Friday night, said he suspected there might be a group responsible for the fugitive's donation "revelation" but did not say who the group might be.

"Many things can happen during campaigning," Chen said, recalling a legislator's accusation that he had received a donation from former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) during the 2000 election campaign.

Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Vice Chairman Alexander Huang (黃介正) said yesterday that the magazine's report could not be confirmed but said that China's attempts to influence the presidential election had become "more mature and skilled."

But Chen Chung-hsin (陳忠信), a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator and head of the DPP's Chinese affairs department, said he had not seen any evidence so far proving that China's arrests of what it called Taiwanese spies were part of a plan to influence the election.

He described China's arrangement of interviews for the media and meetings between the alleged spies and family members as puzzling.

"Perhaps our national security units have obtained more evidence showing the arrests are part of a plot by China to influence our election. But I am not sure about this and I have no access to the information," Chen said.

But he suspected China might be getting up to some mischief.

"We have to be very alert," he said.

With both military threats and aggressive rhetoric failing to coerce the electorate into voting China's favored candidates into office in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections, China this time hoped to place pressure on Taiwan through the US government, Huang said.

But China's trickery "is not over yet," Huang said, adding that it was difficult to speculate at this moment whether China's strategy to influence the election would be more successful than those used in 1996 and 2000.

It was difficult to predict whether China would keep lashing out in an attempt to turn the presidential campaign in its favor, Huang said.

Huang also said the US had not always acted in the way China had hoped it would concerning Taiwan affairs.

He said the US wanted to maintain a neutral stance on cross-strait matters, saying it would respect the choice of the Taiwanese people in this presidential election.

Su Chi (蘇起), former MAC chairman and senior policy advisor to the Chinese Nationalist Party, (KMT) said that compared with its behavior in 1996 and 2000, China had exercised some restraint this time around.

The US' impact on this year's presidential election would be much greater than that of China, said Su, adding that the arrests of supposed Taiwanese spies should not be linked to the election campaign.
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