Leading a series of new Lipton milk tea promotions is a brief TV advertisement featuring a lookalike of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
The irony is that Ma's new role as fair game for parody by advertisers comes as he finally begins to pull strings in his party. Ma's recent olive branch to pan-green-camp supporters in the form of a Liberty Times advertisement on Wednesday marked a turning point: The ad's concession to entrenched support for self-determination and its dismissal of coercion as a tool for unification will likely turn out to be one of the most important local political developments in recent years.
Ma has already set the bar for peaceful unification so high on a number of occasions that Beijing will be tearing its remaining hair out at the knowledge that he is not turning out to be the capitulationist that former KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and other hardliners wanted. Little wonder then that the KMT has already been forced to admit to a "please explain" phone call from anxious Chinese apparatchiks.
Taiwanese can be expected to back Ma for the next presidency if he continues with this approach. It may yet turn out to be the biggest gift Taiwan could hope for.
Former president Lee Teng-hui (
With Ma at the helm of the KMT, we may witness a new cycle of Lee-style nativization, not on the basis of nationalist slogans and ethnic awareness, but more on the basis of Ma's "let's all be friends" style of politicking and a new purging of immoderate elements on the pro-China extremities of the party. If Ma can thereby heal the tension that hardliners attempted to exploit with calls to violence at the last presidential election and so pull off a reconciliation between pan-green and pan-blue voters, he will have ironically stuck the knife deeper into Beijing's agenda. He will have done this by rallying Taiwanese around unificationist rhetoric whose goals are (to Ma) so noble and (to us) so outlandish that Beijing simply cannot deliver on them. Ma has now demanded of Beijing the impossible: accountability for the Tiananmen Square Massacre, demilitarization of the Taiwan Strait, democratic reform and genuine respect for Taiwanese sensibilities.
The interesting question is what Ma is aiming to do with a presidency that will be far too short for him to achieve his ultimate goal of a unified, civilized Chinese state.
Let us assume for the moment that Ma is elected president -- and that his apparent goodwill to the pan-green voter is sincere. If his stint in office is successful, his KMT successor will need to emulate him and defend Taiwanese self-determination.
Otherwise, a humbled and reconfigured DPP will probably replace him, either in four years or eight. Any of these options would surely make supporters of Taiwanese self-determination of all colors shiver with pleasure.
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