Taiwan's jogger-in-chief Ma Ying-jeou (
But Ma's response to Chen's playing hardball at the weekend raises an interesting question about just where the DPP campaign is going. One of the most noticeable things was the lack of policy discussion. Chen could have attacked Ma on many Taipei city issues. Typhoon Nari was the most devastating event ever to happen to the city; Ma's handling of it was lamentably bad and his sloughing of responsibility brazen in the extreme. Then there is police corruption, Ma's pledge to rid the city of prostitution -- a stupid pledge, perhaps, but one he has not made good on -- and the drought fiasco. It isn't hard to question the ability of an administrator who can mishandle catastrophic floods and a drought within an eight-month period.
But Chen didn't take this route. What he attacked was Ma's unification ideology. Ma would rather be the chief of a Special Administrative Region of China than the mayor of the capital of an independent Taiwan (Chen, diplomatically said ROC, but since this newspaper doesn't think the ROC exists, we perforce must paraphrase). Chen's speeches will almost certainly be interpreted as "playing the ethnic card" for which he will be pilloried in the media, the majority of which is pro-China and, not accidentally, pro-Ma. Actually it isn't an ethnic card, it is a Taiwan nationalist card. It is not critical of any ethnic group per se, but simply of those who do not support the goal of an independent Taiwan and who appear to be willing to trade Taiwan's freedoms and sovereignty to China in return for being made part of an unelected political overclass -- a permanent government of Taiwan, much like the clique that runs Hong Kong today. Is this what the people of Taiwan really want?
This is surely the most important political question they have to face and yet it is a question that the DPP has long fought shy of asking with the appropriate amount of bluntness for fear of raising the "ethnic card" hue and cry. Chen also sought to suggest that, if Taiwanese vote for the blue camp, this Hong Kong-like scenario is just what they will get. Now this has nothing to do with how to govern Taipei city effectively; it is a national issue. In choosing to focus on it -- at long last, some of us in the pro-independence camp might say -- rather than the diurnal issues of Taipei living to which the venue might have seemed more appropriate, suggests that Chen knows Lee will be beaten -- just as he was himself -- by the capital's skewed demographics. In using Lee's campaign to open up in a new pugnacious way the vital, visceral issue of Taiwan's future, Chen seems prepared to lose the mayoral battle to win the self-determination war.
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