A few days ago, People First Party (PFP) Chairman and vice presidential candidate James Soong (宋楚瑜) kneeled down before Yunlin County Commissioner Chang Jung-wei (張榮味) during a visit to Yunlin. There has been much speculation over what the reasons for this incident may have been.
If we distance ourselves from the current debate, however, we see that it is a matter of campaign tactics, and that the goal was to win Chang's support. Soong was competing against the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which itself is not afraid of using cutthroat tactics. This shows that the presidential election campaign already is becoming intensely fierce.
Looking at the situation from the point of view of political development, the main effect of the transfer of political power in 2000 has been that the system built during the authoritarian era is about to collapse. In the past, political power was centralized, allowing the central government to control local authorities by dividing them, and to mobilize voters using vote-buying.
Today, the top-level leadership has been changed following a transfer of political power. The political consequences of this development have been that the relative independence of local factions has increased, giving them quite an advantageous bargaining position in the competition between the blue and green camps for votes in the presidential election. As local faction votes begin to shift, the pan-blue camp support base is becoming quite unclear.
This is why uprooting local support and cutthroat tactics have become such important parts of the green camp's campaign strategy. This is based on their understanding of Taiwan's local politics. The power of local factions during election time has been keenly felt by DPP politicians ever since the tang wai (
Furthermore, one of the things presidential election observers agree on is that, on the political map, "the south is green and the north is blue:" setting Chungchangtou (
The saying that the south is green has thus only appeared in connection to the upcoming election. The reason is the collapse of the authoritarian system. If voters haven't broken away from the factions and their manipulative mobilization, then factions have thrown themselves into the arms of the DPP government. Of these, the factions led by Chen Ming-wen (
But for cutthroat tactics to be effective, the possession of government resources must be matched by external conditions. During the authoritarian era, the press wasn't free and the judiciary wasn't independent.
This provided an environment that protected the practice of mobilizing local voters through vote-buying. Following democratization, however, this environment no longer exists, and anyone wanting to mobilize local factions has to carry the cross of "black gold."
This is what allowed former president Lee Teng-hui (
It is worth noting that the first time the DPP tried its hand at cutthroat tactics, it tasted bitter defeat in Hualien. It wanted to take advantage of policy issues to mobilize voters, but instead caused a bad reaction from the media and prosecutors. If they weren't accused of policy vote-buying, then their candidate was being questioned by the authorities. It was obvious that their wish to follow in the footsteps of the KMT and manipulate local forces and mobilize voters was a glaring mistake.
However, advances and retreats in public opinion polls open up new vistas in the campaign battle, and that is the only thing providing the strength needed to engage in local cutthroat tactics. Because politics is a rational, forward-looking occupation, it calculates possibilities that can be made use of in future. This is why, as cutthroat tactics are about to be applied at every turn, passionate kneeling is a predictable response to a problem but not an effective counterattack strategy.
Hsu Yung-ming is an assistant research fellow at the Sun Yat-sen Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy at the Academia Sinica.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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