Each of Taiwan's 31 electoral districts has its own special characteristics. Taoyuan County, which elects 13 members of the Legislature, is the nation's biggest electorate. It is also one of its most complex.
Home to 1,800,000 people, Taoyuan County has long been divided into the North, focused on Taoyuan city, and the South, which has Chungli city as its key city. The North is mainly Hoklo while the South is predominantly Hakka. In addition, numerous military bases and large numbers of military villages throughout the county mean that many Mainlanders also live in Taoyuan.
PHOTO: LU SHU-CHING, TAIPEI TIMES
In addition to the county's some 40,000 Aboriginal people, about one-half of the population is Hoklo, while one-third is Hakka and about one-sixth (or a bit more) is Mainlander.
In the authoritarian period, this ethnic division led to strong competition between a Hoklo and a Hakka faction. The divisions became so bad that the two sides agreed to a rotation of offices.
In addition to these ethnic elements, Taoyuan County also has a coastal region and a mountainous region. This interplay of ethnic and geographical differences makes the county extremely complex for any political party trying to win control. Yet, in the legislative election, Taoyuan elects over seven percent of the seats. Thus, Taoyuan County cannot be ignored.
Over the years, Taoyuan has tended to be a pan-blue citadel. In the March 2004 presidential election, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
People from all sides of the political spectrum agree about two key aspects of the current legislative campaign in Taoyuan.
First, all sides have nominated too many candidates. Nineteen of the twenty-eight candidates running for the thirteen positions are nominees of the four major parties.
In addition, there are at least one or two reasonably powerful non-partisans. Secondly, no party (with the partial exception of the KMT) has implemented a system of vote allocation.
For this election the DPP has nominated seven candidates, even though the presidential vote would suggest six candidates would have been more appropriate. Taoyuan has one seat guaranteed for a woman, and so the DPP added a woman to go with the six seats won by males in the primary election within the DPP.
However, this method of choosing candidates led to the selection of only three from the north -- the heartland of DPP support in Taoyuan -- and the nomination of four candidates in the south, three of whom are Hakka.
Into this mix the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) has now nominated two candidates. Most believe only one, Huang Tsung-yuan (
The pan-blues also have nominated too many candidates. The KMT originally nominated six candidates, though a seventh, actually a member of the New Party, has come in under the KMT banner. The KMT nominations seem to have considered geographical origins more carefully than the DPP.
The geographical distribution has meant that the KMT has ordered each of the township party headquarters to help a specific candidate. This is the only vote allocation so far decreed in Taoyuan, but everyone (including KMT candidates) agrees that it is next to worthless.
Furthermore, the KMT votes in the Huang Fu-hsing (黃復興) Party Headquarters from retired servicemen have all been allocated to Chu Feng-chih (朱鳳芝), a female Mainlander KMT nominee. All other KMT candidates have complained about this distribution, especially as all public opinion polls have Chu in either first or second place, with almost twice as many votes as the third and fourth-ranked candidates. In terms of gender, two of the six original KMT candidates are women.
The PFP has nominated three candidates, bringing the total number of pan-blue nominees to ten. Together with the KMT's Chu, Sun Ta-chien (
With so many candidates running, the margin between winners and losers will be quite small. This means that successful vote allocation could improve a party's result by one or two seats, but it also means that mistakes in vote allocation could mean that a certain winner could lose.
Thus, with the complexity of the election, its uncertainty, and the lateness in the campaign, probably no party will attempt to implement a vote allocation strategy in Taoyuan County. The likelihood is that the pan-greens will keep their five seats and possibly increase their seats to six. But the leading pan-blue candidates will do well. In addition to Sun and Chu, Wu Chih-yang (
Bruce Jacobs is Professor of Asian Languages and Studies and Director of the Taiwan Research Unit at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
AGING: While Japan has 22 submarines, Taiwan only operates four, two of which were commissioned by the US in 1945 and 1946, and transferred to Taiwan in 1973 Taiwan would need at least 12 submarines to reach modern fleet capabilities, CSBC Corp, Taiwan chairman Chen Cheng-hung (陳政宏) said in an interview broadcast on Friday, citing a US assessment. CSBC is testing the nation’s first indigenous defense submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, Narwhal), which is scheduled to be delivered to the navy next month or in July. The Hai Kun has completed torpedo-firing tests and is scheduled to undergo overnight sea trials, Chen said on an SET TV military affairs program. Taiwan would require at least 12 submarines to establish a modern submarine force after assessing the nation’s operational environment and defense
A white king snake that frightened passengers and caused a stir on a Taipei MRT train on Friday evening has been claimed by its owner, who would be fined, Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) said yesterday. A person on Threads posted that he thought he was lucky to find an empty row of seats on Friday after boarding a train on the Bannan (Blue) Line, only to spot a white snake with black stripes after sitting down. Startled, he jumped up, he wrote, describing the encounter as “terrifying.” “Taipei’s rat control plan: Release snakes on the metro,” one person wrote in reply, referring
The coast guard today said that it had disrupted "illegal" operations by a Chinese research ship in waters close to the nation and driven it away, part of what Taipei sees a provocative pattern of China's stepped up maritime activities. The coast guard said that it on Thursday last week detected the Chinese ship Tongji (同濟號), which was commissioned only last year, 29 nautical miles (54km) southeast of the southern tip of Taiwan, although just outside restricted waters. The ship was observed lowering ropes into the water, suspected to be the deployment of scientific instruments for "illegal" survey operations, and the coast
Taiwan’s two cases of hantavirus so far this year are on par with previous years’ case numbers, and the government is coordinating rat extermination work, so there should not be any outbreaks, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞) said today in an interview with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper). An increase in rat sightings in Taipei and New Taipei City has raised concerns about the spread of hantavirus, as rats can carry the disease. In January, a man in his 70s who lived in Taipei’s Daan District (大安) tested positive posthumously for hantavirus, Taiwan’s
RSS