During a dengue fever outbreak in July last year, Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) climbed a banyan tree and declared that holes containing stagnant water should be patched up. It was an obvious photo opportunity that was much ridiculed at the time.
Apparently, the objective was to show Han as a dynamic mayor personally orchestrating the city’s efforts to contain the fever, but the photograph takes on a new metaphorical value in the days leading up to his June 6 recall vote: Han in the banyan now looks like a man fleeing baying hounds.
All the signs point to the recall vote going against him. If he was hoping the COVID-19 pandemic would draw attention away from the vote, he ought to disavow himself of that belief.
Before the crew of the navy supply ship Panshih (磐石), carrying infected personnel, disembarked at Zuoying Naval Base on Wednesday last week, the Kaohsiung City Government had managed to keep the city’s number of COVID-19 infections at zero.
Despite this impressive statistic, a recent public opinion poll on the handling of the pandemic by the mayors of the nation’s six special municipalities placed Han at the bottom of the list, with an approval rating of only 37.1 percent.
Kaohsiung Information Bureau Director-General Cheng Chao-hsin (鄭照新) said on Facebook on Tuesday that the rating was unfair, given the city’s early response to the pandemic: It was the earliest to require that people wear masks and to avoid gatherings of more than 100 people.
Cheng has a point, but Han’s low approval rating suggests that Kaohsiung residents have lost faith in their mayor, and that his attempts to pin the blame on the central government have largely fallen on deaf ears.
That the recall vote is going ahead at all is mainly due to Han abandoning the city for a shot at the presidency. Supporters could argue that he would have been an exemplary mayor had he not been almost entirely absent, but that would be a curious defense.
Han has accepted Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Johnny Chiang’s (江啟臣) invitation to join the party’s Central Standing Committee. The mayor said this would give Kaohsiung a louder voice in the party’s decisionmaking.
However, even former New Taipei City mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫), a former KMT chairman, has said that a mayor simply has no time to entertain distractions such as sitting on the committee.
It is difficult to see how Han believes further absences would endear him to Kaohsiung residents.
Another reason Han gave was that he would be helping out the party, after reports in pro-Beijing media that the Ministry of the Interior had rejected the KMT’s application to register Chiang as the new chairman because it had not included any mayors on its Central Standing Committee.
This report has been shown to be false. It was another attempt to blame the central government and distract the public from the recall vote.
The invitation, and Han’s acceptance of it, suggest that both Chiang and Han have all but conceded that the mayor will lose the recall vote, and are planning for what happens next.
For Han, it would give him much needed relevance in the party after he is recalled; for Chiang, it would keep Han — who is likely to challenge him for the party leadership next year, if allowed to operate as a loose cannon — close, thus bringing him more under control, while at the same time diluting his influence, as he would be part of a committee.
Bringing Han into the committee, and hopefully neutering a potential challenge to his chairmanship, is a clever move on Chiang’s part, even though he has essentially conceded that the KMT is going to lose Kaohsiung.
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