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March sets stage for election battle

Yesterday's rally championing a name change for Taiwan has drawn the battle lines between the pan-blue and pan-green camps for next year's presidential election campaign, said Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明), a political researcher at the Academia Sinica, yesterday.

"The scale of the rally demonstrated that the pan-green forces performed a successful drill for campaigning in the next presidential election by highlighting the theme of rectifying the nation's name and national identification," Hsu said.

Needing a 6 percent swing among voters to win the election, the DPP is unlikely to center its campaign on the theme, Hsu said.

"But the rectification issue will draw a line that separates supporters of Taiwan-centered awareness, advocated by the pan-green forces, from the other group that upholds the existence of the ROC as enshrined by the pan-blue parties," Hsu said.

He believes that the rectification movement, led by former President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), should be able to secure 45 percent of the electorate for incumbent President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).

Hong Kong political commentator Camoes Tan (譚志強) said, however, that yesterday's turnout was the outcome of an all-out mobilization ordered by pan-green partisans.

"Many scholars in Hong Kong engaged in the study of relations between Taiwan and Hong Kong would perceive that the number of people that the rally attracted was a sign that the incumbent president's hope of re-election could be slippery," Tan, who is also an assistant professor of journalism at Hong Kong's Chu-hai University (珠海學院), said in a telephone interview from Hong Kong.

Tan explained that the warning was based upon Chen's inferior position in recent polls indicating that the president's popularity had fallen behind the joint presidential ticket of KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜).

Chen only topped his pan-blue competitors in southern Taiwan in these polls, whereas the latter dominated the constituent's preference in north, east and the central part of the island, Tan said.

"Chen's outlook for attaining a second presidency would be grim if the 75,000 people at the rally represented the result of the pan-green parties' best mobilization for the DPP-elected president," he argued.

"To the general public in Hong Kong, however, the rectification rally in Taiwan was not a hot issue at all. The so-called ROC never existed for the residents here and neither do we think that a country called the Republic of Taiwan would matter much to us," Tan said.

The Academia Sinica researcher Hsu disagreed that the rally exemplified the pan-green's best effort.

Ranking DPP officials did not attended the rally, despite the party's local braches mobilizing people for the rally, Hsu said.

"The marchers were merely part of the supporters of Chen. The mobilization, if there was one, would be one that assembled a group of core stalwarts of the DPP president to form up the rally," Hsu said.

Editor in chief of Contemporary Monthly magazine Chin Heng-wei (金恆煒), who participated in yesterday's rally, was convinced that the event had attracted as many as 150,000 marchers.

The size of the rally was far more than the organizers had expected and encouraged advocates of the name rectification to continue the fight, Chin said.

He was confident that the marchers participating in the rally used their feet to show their support for Chen while they are waiting to use their hands to cast their ballots for him on election day next March.

A large number of invisible supporters who were absent from the rally will not be absent on election day, Chin said.

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