President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will not soon forget Nov. 24, 2018, the day they took a beating in the nine-in-one elections. On Tuesday last week, two years on, Tsai marked the occasion on Facebook by reminding her party colleagues that “in democratic societies it is folly to assume that you have the unconditional support of the electorate.”
Tsai’s post did not mention the 10 referendums bundled with the elections. The referendum topics — including pollution, nuclear power, same-sex marriage, gender equality in education and Japanese food imports from five prefectures following the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster — served as a rallying call for the pan-blue camp. These issues fed fear and hatred, and in the end coalesced into a “Han wave” of support for former Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜).
Tsai was certainly right to talk of the folly of assuming the support of the electorate in democratic societies, and the pan-blue camp’s use of populist support and how it whipped it up to its advantage is sure to be a lesson she will never forget.
The pan-blue camp has not forgotten.
Two months ago the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) submitted two referendum proposals to the Central Election Commission (CEC).
The first, submitted by KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), proposed to ask voters if they agree that referendums should be held on the same day as nationwide elections, if a nationwide election is scheduled to be held one to six months after the proposal is approved.
The second, submitted by KMT caucus whip Lin Wei-chou (林為洲), proposed to ask voters if they agree that the government should impose a complete ban on the importation of meat, offal and related products from pigs fed leanness-enhancing agents, including ractopamine and other beta agonists.
The party was not impressed when the CEC called a hearing and required that the wording of the referendums be amended by a given deadline.
The two referendum proposals bring to mind the 10 referendum proposals bundled with the 2018 nine-in-one elections.
The questions in 2018 neatly circumvented the issues — Taiwan’s sovereignty and cross-strait relations — considered to be the KMT’s Achilles’ heel.
The KMT took contentious and divisive issues that resonated with its natural populist appeal and roiled the seas of social discontent such that the Han wave was all but impossible to hold back.
The Tsai administration and the DPP were swept up in its wake, and even Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) found himself buffeted off course.
The KMT once more finds itself at an ebb and its leadership is casting about for a new populist cause to cling to in the newly rising tide.
As battle lines over the importation of US pork containing residues of ractopamine are drawn, the KMT is unleashing a wave of populist propaganda intended to inundate a policy proposal with its attendant scientific, trade and foreign relations rationale.
The wave will wash it away, leaving little behind but catchy protest slogans — and demanding that US pork is kept out of the country, that tests show zero traces of ractopamine, that the US abattoirs are inspected, that provenance is labeled clearly, that all US pork be banned from schools and campuses, that reports to the legislature be boycotted, that Tsai is forced to debate the issue with the KMT chairman and that the US-Taiwan agreement is renegotiated.
All of this is designed to panic and disorient the public, to sow dismay, fear, helplessness and anger, and to entrench these in their minds so that people can barely think straight about the issue.
All of this discontent and confusion is focused squarely on the government.
While the pan-blue camp issues incessant calls for the government to account for itself, it does not allow officials to offer clarifications, battering any forum with populist sloganeering.
Their true intent, far from desiring rational debate leading to further clarity, is simply to obfuscate the issue and to shove the public into a bottomless pit of despair, where they can do nothing but fester as they nurse their resentment and grudges.
It is no doubt still fresh in people’s minds how this kind of populist chicanery was exploited to its fullest in 2018.
The Han wave had no need of policy debate, as it was fixated on having its pie in the sky, with promises of a “Love Ferris Wheel” project; oil drilling on Itu Aba Island (Taiping Island, 太平島); tourists flooding in, goods flowing out and everyone getting rich; zero politics and 100 percent economics; relying on the US for national defense, Japan for technology, China for a market and Taiwan for honest hard work. These wonderful slogans coagulated into a miraculous mirage that had voters swooning.
The 2018 referendum topics stirred up the electorate’s more conservative proclivities — demonizing any change — as unscrupulous politicians exploited a process intended to elicit consensus through rational debate around issues to instead cause division and social tension.
Of course, thrown into the mix were the usual suspects protesting against pension reform.
It is no exaggeration to say that social nerves were on the verge of fraying, all the way until election day — held up by confusion over voting on the referendums — when everything came to a head.
The people behind all of the 2018 manipulation and chaos became far too fired up by their success to forget those heady days of populist disruption, and they are now up to the same old tricks with the importation of US pork and the ractopamine residue issue.
What took place around the National Communications Commission’s decision not to renew the license of a certain media organization was similar. The objectors came out of the woodwork, trying to get the public on their side by waxing lyrical about abstract concepts such as freedom of the press and freedom of expression.
This group was harping on about challenges to press freedom and freedom of expression when these are enjoyed daily in Taiwan’s rather unbalanced media environment. Yet they did not stop to reflect for one second about whether the very company they were defending complied with the spirit of such worthy principles.
The media organization’s defenders seemed to believe that all they needed to do was to bleat unanimously without seeking out those who disagreed with their position — and equate the bleating with freedom of the press and freedom of expression, as if the government was trying to force the media to do what it wanted. From several opinion polls, sections of society have been influenced by this.
Large numbers of people are having their heads filled with empty slogans, while seemingly forgetting which party has an ignominious history of clamping down on press freedom and freedom of expression. They can speak of these freedoms, in the same way that a whorehouse madam can spout all day about the virtues of chastity, and yet who would link the two beyond the melodious words?
The pan-blue camp lacks a charismatic leader who could bring together a populist drive like the Han wave — a serious drawback for them — and the governing party is not as vulnerable as it was in 2018.
That said, an advance force has been deployed to attack the US pork imports policy head on. The government is prepared to announce a raft of measures — details about factory inspections, imports, testing, labeling and management — which should have been unveiled long ago to put people’s minds at ease and offset a populist onslaught.
Today’s circumstances do not compare with 2018, when the Tsai administration and the DPP were more vulnerable — a populist assault is not guaranteed to work again. Yet the government remains vulnerable to a populist attack. If it allows its message to be buried under a flurry of slogans, no amount of rational debate will be able to save it.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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