So it's to be a Lien-Soong ticket after all -- or so we are being led to believe since the two parties concerned haven't actually brought themselves to utter the phrase as yet.
There is, as the saying goes, "many a slip twixt cup and lip" and whether last Friday's spirit of reluctant bonhomie will prevail as the election gets nearer remains to be seen. Given that only three years ago Lien Chan (
What we do not know is the price with which Soong has been bought. Of course we know some of it -- the dropping of the Chunghsing Bills Finance case -- but it remains to be seen what deal has been hammered out on who is to do what. It is widely thought that Soong wants the premiership as well as the vice presidency. Some will claim this is unconstitutional but Lien's concurrent occupancy of the two positions in 1996 was never struck down by the Council of Grand Justices, though it was certainly against the spirit -- if not the letter -- of the Constitution. For now the two parties are being quiet about what deal has been struck for fear of appearing to be "booty sharing," ie, dividing up the spoils of power like a bunch of pirates sharing out their loot -- which is, of course, an apt image for the past 50 years of KMT government.
For pan-green supporters the times are increasingly bleak. The impotence in any area of substance along with the huge moral cowardice of the President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) administration is actually driving previously deeply committed pan-green supporters out of politics altogether. People who have been on every political protest demonstration since the days of martial law are now slipping into what used to be known in Eastern Europe as "internal exile" a state where one simply gives up on politics as an instrument of bettering society and resorts to the private pleasures of family life and apolitical diversions. The Chen government has shown such contempt for the hopes, fears, values and aspirations of the people that put it in office that there simply seems to be no point in bothering anymore. Why hit the streets to campaign for a government that has no interest in a really "green" agenda, to campaign for a president who in his inaugural speech committed himself to not doing exactly those things for which he had been elected? And it has gone downhill from there!
It is tempting amid this gloom, and amid the war whoops of the pan-blues who seem to be convinced that it can stroll back into power, to give up, to say "damn it, let them have another four years of blue-camp government; then they will find out what a huge mistake they are making." But this is a temptation that, however fed up one is, must be resisted. That the blue camp is conspiring with China to undermine or renounce Taiwan's sovereignty is a matter of record attested to by many independent witnesses. Anyone who cherishes Taiwan's independence, even if only the de facto kind, has to fear what a blue-camp government could do with another four years in power. It is risk that Taiwan cannot afford, which is why green-camp supporters have to get out there and campaign for the Chen government anyway. However bad things are, think how much worse they could be.
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