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.
China might accelerate its strategic actions toward Taiwan, the South China Sea and across the first island chain, after the US officially entered a military conflict with Iran, as Beijing would perceive Washington as incapable of fighting a two-front war, a military expert said yesterday. The US’ ongoing conflict with Iran is not merely an act of retaliation or a “delaying tactic,” but a strategic military campaign aimed at dismantling Tehran’s nuclear capabilities and reshaping the regional order in the Middle East, said National Defense University distinguished adjunct lecturer Holmes Liao (廖宏祥), former McDonnell Douglas Aerospace representative in Taiwan. If
Prosecutors in New Taipei City yesterday indicted 31 individuals affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for allegedly forging thousands of signatures in recall campaigns targeting three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The indictments stem from investigations launched earlier this year after DPP lawmakers Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) and Lee Kuen-cheng (李坤城) filed criminal complaints accusing campaign organizers of submitting false signatures in recall petitions against them. According to the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office, a total of 2,566 forged recall proposal forms in the initial proposer petition were found during the probe. Among those
ECHOVIRUS 11: The rate of enterovirus infections in northern Taiwan increased last week, with a four-year-old girl developing acute flaccid paralysis, the CDC said Two imported cases of chikungunya fever were reported last week, raising the total this year to 13 cases — the most for the same period in 18 years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. The two cases were a Taiwanese and a foreign national who both arrived from Indonesia, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The 13 cases reported this year are the most for the same period since chikungunya was added to the list of notifiable communicable diseases in October 2007, she said, adding that all the cases this year were imported, including 11 from
A 23-year-old Taichung man vowed to drink more water after his heavy consumption of sugary tea landed him in hospital with a kidney infection and sepsis. The man, surnamed Lin (林), used to drink two cups of half-sugar oolong tea while working at a food stall, where he often had to wait a long time before urinating. Lin developed kidney stones and noticed blood in his urine, but ignored the issue after taking medication for three days. A month later, he went to the emergency room after experiencing a recurring fever and was diagnosed with a kidney infection that led to sepsis, landing
RSS