Sat, Oct 27, 2001 page8

• The DPP shifts from left to center

  • By Laurence Eyton
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  Last Saturday's decision at the DPP party congress to abandon the quest for Taiwan independence as expressed in the party platform is not only a shrewd realignment of policy only five weeks before legislative and local government elections but marks a sea change in Taiwan's politics, namely the end of the "heroic" age of the DPP.

  The actual move approved by the congress was to raise the level of party resolutions to the same as that of clauses in the party's charter. That might look like an inconsequential piece of procedural trivia; actually it means that the party is now committed, through a 1999 resolution, to the maintenance of the status quo -- de facto independence -- and a referendum about any change in this. This takes the place of a clause added to the party platform in 1991 mandating the party to seek the establishment of de jure independence in the eyes of the world.

  This so-called "independence clause" has proved to be a burden for the party if only because, like the British Labour Party's pre-Blairite commitment to "public ownership of ?the means of production," in its quest for radical change it far exceeded the wishes of the electorate that it was trying to woo.

  Taiwanese who want de jure independence -- the establishment of a "Republic of Taiwan" and the cutting of any umbilical cord between Taiwan and China -- are very much a minority. The majority on Taiwan simply do not want to risk armed conflict with China over the assertion of a legal status which has little impact on their day-to-day lives.

  What they want, of course, is the status quo, in which Taiwan enjoys de facto independence and, as long as it does not try to push this any further, the protection of the US against revanchist zealots across the Taiwan Strait.

  The DPP's commitment to de jure independence has therefore proved to be something of damper on the party's electoral chances. The people of Taiwan, by and large a cautious bunch, have tended to see the party as composed of hot-headed ideologues who might lead the country into trouble.

  That the DPP won the presidential election last year was only in very small part due to recent lessening of this distrust. The decisive factor was the anti-DPP camp's disastrous splitting of its vote.

  Interestingly, the DPP did not adopt the independence clause at the time of its founding in 1986. It had more important things to do, such as campaign for the democratization of political institutions. Only when this had been firmly set in motion, following the National Affairs Conference of 1990, did it need another major issue with which to define itself. That it focused so heavily on independence has much to do with the makeup of the party and political role early DPP cadres saw themselves fulfilling.

  Basically, the early leading lights of the party such as Shih Ming-teh (施明德) saw their role as that of social revolutionaries radicalizing a population long in political hibernation.

  Their task was both to awaken and educate undeveloped political conciousnesses and steer those conciousnesses toward ideological goals set by the already politically mature party elite. If this sounds essentially Leninist it is hardly surprising, since the DPP created itself in the KMT's image -- what other political model was available? -- and the KMT was a Leninist creation.

  They were to describe the shape of the new world to Taiwan's Rip van Winkle electorate, define where that electorate should now set its sights on and lead them to that goal.

  This idea of consciousness-raising proved a failure, being repudiated in legislative elections in 1995 and 1998. The reality was that the people were far more politically sophisticated than the DPP gave them credit for. As a result they had a well developed sense of what they wanted -- more prosperity, less corruption -- and what they didn't want -- conflict with China. They were -- and are -- hugely pragmatic and extremely materialist, barren ground indeed for the seed of revolutionary ideologues.

  The problem for the DPP old guard was that it knew how to effect radical change within a closed political system, namely by revolutionary zeal driving intransigent public disobedience fueled by a large amount of courage. Unfortunately, it didn't know how to win elections in a democracy, a less romantic process of finding out the rather prosaic things that most people want -- better schools, cleaner air, less crime -- and working out a plausible way of offering it to them.

  The DPP's acknowledgment of this came perhaps not as a result of a political reorientation so much as a generational change in the party's leadership. People like Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) and Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) might not be very different from say, Shih, in age, but they belong to a different political generation, one that learned to beat "the system" from within rather than challenge it from without.

  This generational change is not complete -- surely the difficulties between the president and Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), an unreconstructed "revolutionary" are evidence of this, as was the cancellation of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, a decision that owed far more to an idea of what the public should want rather than what they did.

  That this maturity is something still not fully accepted by many party die-hards is also shown by the difficulties of abandoning the independence clause, the fact that it could not simply be voted out of existence -- which would require a majority of a size probably unobtainable -- but had to be sidelined via a procedural ploy.

  That the independence clause is now "superseded" by the 1999 resolution can only be to the DPP's advantage. It does not need great political acumen to see the advantages in swinging party policy -- now advocating the retention of the status quo indefinitely, only to be changed with the approval of the electorate via a referendum -- into line with the wishes of the vast majority of the people of Taiwan.

  This marks the completion of the DPP's repositioning itself solidly in the political center and its political coming of age. It is interesting to compare this with the KMT which, after seeming so mature for so long, now seems to be in something approaching senile dementia in its re-embrace of greater-Chinese nationalism.

  On a personal note, the fate of the old DPP radicals is quite melancholy to see. ?Not that they have been "purged" in a Stalinist sense, but they have been utterly marginalized politically. Shih for example has gone from being Taiwan's version of Nelson Mandela to an avatar of Lech Walesa, the giant who challenged -- and toppled -- communism in Poland in the 1980s, but who could only get a pitiful 1 percent of the vote in that country's presidential election last August. Indeed it is impossible to look at the feeble antics of the group Mountain without being reminded of Norma Desmond, the reclusive silent screen star character in Sunset Boulevard and her magnificent scorn when recognized as someone who "used to be big in movies" as she replies: "I'm still big, it's the movies that got small."

  Maybe politics in Taiwan got small, but that, of course, is the nature of most modern democracies. "Pity the land that has need of heroes," Galileo says in Brecht's eponymous play. As ?the DPP enters its post-heroic age, Taiwan becomes a more normal country and the "sadness of being Taiwanese" sinks further into history. Who could find fault with that?

  Laurence Eyton is managing editor of the Taipei Times.
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