In 2014, then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) attempted to ram through the legislature a trade pact with China. At the time, many Taiwanese feared that, if ratified, the pact would have resulted in Taiwan’s economy becoming irrevocably wedded to China’s, enabling a death-by-a-thousand-cuts annexation, without a single shot being fired.
Ma’s obstinacy — many would say treachery — not only led the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to electoral ruin in the 2016 presidential election, but also spawned a popular backlash and political awakening among Taiwanese youth, the Sunflower movement. Ever since Ma stepped down as chairman in 2014, the KMT has been struggling to find a role and win back the trust of the electorate. However, the party’s identity crisis can be traced farther back to Taiwan’s democratization movement.
Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), the KMT’s first Taiwanese-born chairperson, subverted the party from within. He dismantled the authoritarian machinery of the KMT party-state and introduced universal suffrage. The party emerged blinking into the sunlight, forced to make its way in a world that had changed beyond recognition. As former US secretary of state Dean Acheson in 1962 pithily observed of post-colonial Britain: “Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.” The same could be said of the KMT.
Ma’s resignation in 2014 was followed by a brief stint by Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) as interim chairman, before the party elected then-New Taipei City mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) to be its chairperson. Chu was dealt a bad hand, inheriting the baggage of Ma’s injudicious dalliance with Beijing and the KMT lost heavily in the 2016 presidential election. Chu was replaced by Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), a hardline Chinese nationalist and advocate of “rapid unification” with China.
Hung rapidly crashed and burned, and Wu returned as party chairman. However, a populist insurgency by then-Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) led to his nomination as the party’s candidate in last year’s presidential election. Han conceded a landslide second-term victory to President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of the Democratic Progressive Party, leading to Wu’s resignation as KMT chairman and the election of Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) as party leader in March last year. Since then, Chiang has tried to reform the party, but has reportedly been thwarted at every stage by party hardliners.
On Saturday last week, Chu made a comeback as party chairman, beating stiff competition from pro-Beijing Sun Yat-sen School president Chang Ya-chung (張亞中) and a re-election bid by Chiang.
Although often described as a reformer, during his first stint as chairman in 2015, Chu held a secretive closed-door meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), as did Ma before him, and Hung after him. The exception to this rule is Chiang, who was frozen out by Beijing and did not receive a customary congratulatory telegram after his election as chairman. Chu received an immediate congratulatory telegram from Xi on Sunday.
Chu’s fawning reply to Xi was even more telling: Chu blamed the DPP’s “desinicization and anti-China polices” for altering the so-called “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait and restated his vows: acknowledging the existence of the mythical “1992 consensus” and opposing Taiwanese independence.
Chiang’s attempt to reform the KMT, an authoritarian organization without a shred of democratic DNA in its body, was perhaps destined to fail from the outset. Under Chu’s leadership, Taiwan can expect more plotting and scheming with Beijing to undermine the elected government. While this might be a boon for the DPP’s electoral prospects, it is bad news for the health of Taiwan’s democracy, and for the security of the nation.
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