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One Year On: Politics - Just getting started

By William Ide with staff reporters

Sunday, May 20, 2001, Page 13

A year ago everyone knew that a transition of power after more than 50 years of one party rule wasn't going to be easy.

But few would have guessed it would have been this tough.

Today marks the first anniversary of the beginning of this new political era, but few have much to celebrate. The government's pundits and politicians (especially) are telling the public just how bad things have become.

The critics say that it's the government lack of experience, President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) authoritarian tendencies, and the government's blatant disregard for the Constitution. The government blames the opposition for bashing it at every opportunity it gets, purposely blocking legislation and hindering its every move.

The answer, perhaps, is somewhere in between. And more than anything else the weaknesses of Taiwan's political system, the unwillingness of political parties to find a common ground and Taiwan's media have contributed to this growing feeling of inertia.

President Chen Shui-bian apologizes to KMT Chairman Lien Chan over the timing of the announcement on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant's fate. FILE PHOTO

Unavoidable Accident

Even before President Chen stepped into office, the public was well aware of the political realities and undertow the new ruling party, which garnered a little less than 40 percent at the ballot box, would be up against. The Constitution does not specifically state whether the government is a Cabinet or Presidential system, leaving Chen's position as a policy maker ambiguous. Chen of course wants the government to function like a presidential system but is forced to work almost covertly, behind the scenes, because of the limitations within the system.

In one of the more positive events of the past year, President Chen attends a 'Human Rights Wedding,' highlight the administration's human rights policies.

The KMT, which was miserably defeated in the presidential elections, holds a majority in the Legislative Yuan and insists that the system is a semi-presidential system, ie, Chen must bow to the majority party in the legislature.

Not surprisingly, he has been unwilling to do this.

More than anything else, this debate has been the source of tension between the president, his Cabinet and the legislative branch. Instability has spread to society, the stock market and the economy and was key in bringing on one major and two minor Cabinet reshuffles over the past year.

Chen Shui-bian Age: 51 Place of Birth: Tainan County Career 1974: Graduated from National Taiwan University Law Department. 1975:Married Wu Shu-chen (吳淑珍) 1980: Served as the defense counsel for Huang Hsin-chieh (黃信介) - one of the Kaohsiung Incident's eight. 1981: Elected as Taipei City Councilor. 1984: Wu is deliberately run over in a politically motivated attack at a campaign rally in Tainan County. As a result the became a paraplegic. 1985: Chen jailed for eight months for libel. 1989: Elected as legislator. 1992: Re-elected as legislator. 1994: Took part in the first director elections for metropolitan mayors and provincial governor in Taiwan's history. He was elected as Taipei City Mayor. 1998: Failed in the Taipei Mayoral reelection. 2000: Won the presidential election and became President. Successes: Peacefully accomplished the transition of power from the KMT and maintained Taiwan's national security. Failures: Raised a confidence crisis for Taiwan's economic development. Grade: B

Premier Tang Fei (唐飛), the shortest-serving premier in Taiwan's history, stepped down in early October when he was unable to tow the government's line and oppose the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant. Two other minor reshuffles occurred one in late summer of last year over the so-called "Pachang Creek Tragedy" and the other in March of this year when the EPA failed to react quickly to a major oil spill at Kenting National Park.

Stepping down is widely believed to be the way to take responsibility in Taiwan, and with an opposition alliance breathing down the Cabinet's neck, any setback or mistake can trigger a call for a reshuffle.

Some politicians believe such setbacks could have been avoided if it wasn't for the president's poor judgment.

Shih Ming-teh (施明德), a lawmaker and former DPP Chairman, who announced his departure from the DPP early this year, says Chen spends more time attacking the opposition than he should and less time trying to deal with the current political reality: that the DPP is a minority ruling party.

"Continuing to stir up confrontation will only accelerate cooperation between the opposition parties, and further cause DPP policies to face repeated setbacks," Shih has said.

Others say that neither side has wised up to the fact that they have changed places and that the ruling party still acts like an opposition party and the KMT continues to act like it is still in power.

In the legislature many of the bills that the ruling party has wanted to promote have been stopped by the opposition alliance. The KMT has developed its own way of opposing legislation calling items that are not in its interest -- especially anti-corruption legislation -- "controversial."

President Chen has little with which to oppose such obstructionism so he uses analogies, instead, to argue his point that the government needs more time and room to grow.

Earlier this week he likened the government to a small tree planted after a typhoon -- the transfer of power. During that typhoon a larger tree had been uprooted, and the smaller one -- the DPP -- had replaced it, he explained. But instead of getting the nourishment the little tree needs, it has been harassed from the time it was planted, Chen said.

"Some people do all they can to shake the small tree to the point that it becomes useless," Chen said.

Political Meltdown

With the government skating on such thin ice, it was only a matter of time before cracks started to appear. Last fall on October 27, when it announced plans to cancel the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, any hope that either side could work together fell through.

Since then neither side has been able to find any common ground and it is expected that the tug of war will continue at least until the Legislative Yuan elections at the end of the year.

Chen has already made it clear that he is waiting for that moment to cut through the current political stalemate.

"Regardless of the election results, we will form a coalition government and a majority alliance of lawmakers to restructure the legislature and stabilize politics," he said in televised comments on Friday.

It wasn't, however, as if the government hadn't tried.

Attempts by Chen to work with a repudiated KMT and Lien Chan, who only garnered 23 percent in last year's presidential elections, were destined to fail from the start.

After the election Chen asked the opposition to meet, to hold round-table talks with the government, but one offer after another was rejected. Only the all but extinct New Party agreed to meet with Chen.

If that wasn't enough, any KMT member who was willing to work with the government, a party strapped for administrative resources, became an outcast. When Tang Fei accepted his post as premier of the Executive Yuan, the KMT took away his party rights. Other KMT members who served in the DPP's Cabinet suffered the same fate.

While Chen had begun inviting opposition leaders to sit and have talks with him shortly after he was elected, it wasn't until Oct. 19 that James Soong (宋楚瑜) was willing to meet with Chen. Lien Chan met with Chen on Oct. 27 only moments before the announcement to cancel the plant was made.

In the meeting Chen told Lien that a decision over the plant would be made "soon," little did he know it would come only moments later in a press conference held by the premier.

Less than 24 hours after the announcement was made, Lien feeling jilted, called off party-to-party talks branding Chen as "rude" and "childish;" newspaper headlines called the decision a "nuclear explosion." Shortly afterwards Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) was labeled persona non grata and barred from the Legislative Yuan.

Tempers gradually cooled, but not until after a push by lawmakers to recall the president fizzled out. A Constitutional interpretation by the Council of Grand Justices in January that pointed the finger at both the Executive Yuan and the Legislative Yuan. Finally the government announced in February that the project's construction would resume.

Media feeding frenzy

Of course the so called opposition alliance -- a temporary suspension of hostilities between Lien and his great rival Soong and their camp followers to work against the greater DPP foe -- has Taiwan's media to thank for making its work easier.

For the president and Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), their battle against the media really began last summer when television cameras caught the struggle and death of four riverbed workers stuck in a raging river during a flash flood.

Rescue teams which made it to the scene at Pachang Creek (八掌溪) in Chiayi County could do little to help the stranded workers because they showed up unprepared. Helicopter rescue teams wasted too much time arguing over who would go, so that, in the end any attempt to help was too late.

Taiwan's television stations provided harrowing footage and the legislature had a field day. The "Pachang Creek incident" became a byword for the government's ineptitude.

Only last weekend, as a fire blazed on for over 40 hours in a high-tech complex in Taipei County's Hsichih, the words "Pachang Creek" were being uttered again.

The opposition couldn't have asked for a better stick with which to beat the government, to show just how hopeless Taiwan had become under DPP rule.

It was a propaganda victory for the opposition in the face of the facts.

For example, in the Pachang Creek incident the rescue team from Chiayi fire department showed up with nothing to rescue the stranded workers with. The workers' employer had sent them out to work on the riverbed project on a rainy day with no one standing upstream to warn of the possibility of flash floods.

While these problems were mentioned by the media, they were quickly brushed aside apparently because they seemed boring, or because they lacked any fuel to feed political infighting.

"The media is not concerned about public interest. It just uses political struggle to stimulate readership or viewership," said Hu You-wei (胡幼偉) a journalism professor at National Taiwan Normal University. "They [the media] keep on telling us how hard things have become. But, if you need concrete solutions you can't find them with any political party or in the media."

Part of this is a result of inherent bias toward the DPP, Hu said, because some media professionals were not happy that the party rose to power so quickly.

But even if the Pachang Creek incident hadn't occurred, the opposition and media would have found other incidents to use to incriminate the government, Hu said quoting a Chinese proverb "If you wish to incriminate someone, you will have no difficulty finding a pretext" (欲加之罪,何患無詞).

"The media and a lot of people are just not willing to give him [Chen] any time," Hu said.

Some Progress

In the areas where the opposition parties' reach was limited, however, the government's progress in carrying out reform was steadier.

In its crackdown on "black gold" (黑金) or money and gangster-influenced politics, the government has led an unprecedented attack on the elements of corruption, casting its net farther and wider than ever before.

While there have been some serious blunders by prosecutors along the way, their efforts are finally reaching into places that have long been off limits.

Over the past year 164 public representatives have been indicted.

On Thursday of this week, Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南) announced plans to do away with the death penalty in three years' time.

Such a goal, if realized, would be a major breakthrough for human rights in Taiwan, activists say. But the move will not be easy; statistics show that at least 80 percent of the public is opposed to the doing away with the death penalty.

But the president's greatest success has been, ironically for the erstwhile pro-independence hardliner, in cross-strait relations.

Before the elections, the KMT, much like Beijing, was predicting that if the DPP was ever in power, China would rain missiles on Taiwan and that young men would have to trade in their "A-bian" hats for military helmets.

Those prognostications were far from the truth. While relations with China have not improved dramatically, they haven't sunk to the lows that were originally expected. Nor have they been as bad as they were in 1995-96 and 1999 under KMT rule.

Opposition lawmakers have meddled in cross-strait affairs as well, making it impossible for Nobel Laureate Lee Yuan-tseh's (李遠哲) cross-party task force to move Taiwan closer toward building its own consensus.

But Chen's steady release of goodwill gestures to China and efforts by the government to open up the "small three links," a move more symbolic than it is substantial, have made it difficult for China and the opposition in Taiwan to push the government too far off course.

"Given the predicament Chen is in, he has done a better-than-expected job at guarding the nation's security," said Andy Chang (張五岳), a China watcher at Tamkang University.

One would hope that such a glimmer of success would spread elsewhere, not necessarily for the DPP's sake, but for Taiwan.
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