Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.”
Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by the KMT, and so on.
In fact, the country has always been divided. Division is a permanent feature of its politics.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
The ABC piece could have taken another direction: the recalls in fact show how unified the country is around its ideals of democratic process. While the KMT has done its level best to vilify and discredit the recalls, they proceed peacefully, handled by civil society organizations and volunteers. The worst thing that happens around them is heated arguments, which are quite normal to politics in every democracy. Given a social problem, how did Taiwanese address it? They dialed up democracy.
CONTEXT IS KEY, ABC
ABC could have contextualized the recalls by pointing to the peaceful transitions of power since the 2004 election, the voter turnout rates, which are better then most democracies, the rapidity and cleanliness of the vote count, and so on. It could have located the recalls in the long development of Taiwan’s democracy and constitutional reform after the KMT’s authoritarian rule (a period missing from the piece). Or ABC could have pointed to the president’s lack of a veto as a factor in necessitating the recalls.
Instead, the ABC piece panned the civil society groups as “DPP-aligned,” showing a complete inability to parse the possibility of being pro-Taiwan yet having independent agency. The irony is that the piece then replicated the issue it was ostensibly complaining about by simply sorting all political action into the pro-KMT/pro-DPP divide.
ABC missed another important context: the recall movement, panned by the TPP, is in fact the direct result of TPP political choices. Its legislators are critical to the balance of power in the legislature. Taiwan could have been treated to real politics, with the TPP shifting from party to party — the KMT to the DPP — to accomplish the goals it claimed to be in favor of before the election.
Instead, it threw away that golden moment, and subordinated itself blindly to the KMT. It now marches in lockstep with the KMT, vote after vote. Had the TPP retained its independence, recalls would not be necessary to obtain a legislature that serves national interests. We would already have such a legislature.
One trigger of the recalls were the cuts to the defense budget by the KMT and TPP, which are aligned with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It is thus cheering to note that the new TV series, Zero Day, which depicts a PRC invasion of Taiwan, will be airing next month during the run-up to the recall elections.
SAME OLD KMT TACTICS
Another looming recall threat is the KMT’s against President William Lai (賴清德), supposedly set for May 20, the anniversary of the president’s first year in office (presidents cannot be recalled during their first year in office). Presidential recall requirements are stringent and success unlikely. But the KMT’s response to the budgetary and constitutional crisis it has engendered is highly indicative. It has resurrected the playbook it used to attack DPP president Chen Shui-bian.
During the Chen years the KMT controlled the legislature. The KMT attempted recalls several times. In response to a failed recall in 2006, the People’s First Party (PFP), then powerful, called for a vote of no confidence in the premier to bring down the government. Sound familiar? At first the KMT vowed to support this, but then after a closed-door KMT-PFP meeting, the idea was shelved.
A second Chen-era move, aimed at outsiders, is to say that Lai is unstable and could plunge the nation into war. The foreign media, always looking for sensational clickbait, too often laps that nonsense up.
The accusations that Lai is a dictator and “Hitler” are also a hoary tactic of the KMT dating back to Chen. At the 2006 pan-Blue “Red Shirts” protests against Chen the marchers paraded a float of him depicted as Hitler. In the 2004 election the KMT ran ads with a similar theme.
“The advertisement, printed in the island’s three largest Chinese-language dailies,” described the BBC, “accused the president of becoming ‘more and more like Hitler’ and violating freedom of speech.”
During the 2008 election campaign, the Nazi comparison again resurfaced, except this time with DPP presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷). An August 2007 United Daily News editorial entitled “Frank, you’re starting to sound like a Nazi,” translated on the KMT’s own Web site observed: “Hsieh’s plan for the presidential campaign — inciting communal strifes [sic] now, switching to the language of reconciliation and coexistence after the election — is simply Nazism in action.”
THE DPP AS NAZIS
In 2010 it was then-DPP chair Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) turn. The pro-KMT, English-language China Post wrote the following in an April editorial that year: “Like Adolf Hitler endlessly chanting Nazi mantras to mesmerize the Germans into following him, the DPP chairwoman simply has to drone on Ma’s conspiracy to consolidate the party’s power base in central and southern Taiwan.”
Similarly, running against Tsai during the 2016 election campaign, KMT presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) posted an essay on her Facebook explaining that DPP populism was basically Nazism.
The Nazi accusation exists to rally the base by recasting the KMT’s supporters, for so long pillars of authoritarianism, as victims of democracy. Hence the recent reach for Nazism by KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫). According to the Taipei Times, “Chu drew parallels between the DPP under President William Lai (賴清德) now and the fascism of Germany under Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini in the 1930s.”
After being criticized by the de facto embassies of Germany and Israel in Taiwan, Chu doubled down on the accusations, again provoking a response. Chu then retreated, satisfied that he had presented the proper face to his base (he is also facing a challenge in the upcoming party chair election). By responding, the embassies elevated his profile among his own people.
Use of this tactic is rooted in the communal fear of majority rule among KMT supporters, who represent a colonial population that has lost its power. In the 2016 Facebook essay mentioned above, Hung mimicked the famed Poem of Martin Niemoller, First They Came, presenting as victims of the DPP soldiers, teachers, and civil servants, all groups traditionally supportive of the KMT.
The KMT reaching for the playbook it has consistently used against the DPP simply shows how bereft of new ideas and Taiwan-centered policies the party is. If it wanted to stop the recalls, it merely had to serve the future of Taiwan.
Taiwan is not divided. It’s just that KMT refuses to join it.
Notes from Central Taiwan is a column written by long-term resident Michael Turton, who provides incisive commentary informed by three decades of living in and writing about his adoptive country. The views expressed here are his own.
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