The second presidential election campaign in Taiwan's young history as a democracy has entered its final week, providing a useful moment to ponder its larger meaning. This hard-fought election contest will determine more than simply which man and which (if any) party governs the country. It will also shape in important ways the future character and quality of democracy in the country.
Since democracy itself has become the most precious and unassailable dimension of Taiwan's appeal for respect and legitimacy in world affairs, the implications of this election for Taiwan's democracy are not merely a matter of quaint idealism. They tap some of the most vital foundations of Taiwan's national security: its ability to mobilize support from its own people and from other powerful democracies in the world, including Japan, Europe, and most especially the US.
In taking stock of an election campaign, historical and international comparisons help to put things in perspective. Many journalists, analysts, and ordinary voters in Taiwan decry what they see to be the low tone of the current presidential election campaign: the negative advertising, the hyperbolic rhetoric, the heavy tendency toward ethnic voting, the threats of economic chaos or war if a certain candidate is elected. All of these may be regrettable, but they are also fairly typical in the life of a developing democracy, and it is not yet apparent that they will exceed the worst excesses of American politics in the last half century, for example.
The US example
A few examples will suffice to make the point. Richard Nixon built his early political career on shameless "red baiting" of his electoral opponents. In the 1950 Senate election in California, he defeated his opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas by stamping her as the "pink lady." Two years later, he served as an "attack dog" for the statesmanlike and avuncular Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In 1960, the tables of rough-and-tumble electoral politics were turned on Nixon when, in one of the closest elections in US history, he lost by a whisker to John F. Kennedy. There was credible evidence of serious vote fraud in two of the large states that Kennedy carried by very narrow margins, Illinois (where the Chicago city machine saw to it that people voted "early and often") and Texas (where, in some districts under the sway of vice-presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson's political machine, it was said that "the dead rose" for election day). These frauds may well have cost Nixon the victory, and some of his supporters urged him to challenge the results of the election. However, Nixon -- in his finest moment in American public life -- declined, judging that even if he had been cheated of victory, launching court battles to determine the outcome would gravely damage American democracy.
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson rode to a crushing, landslide victory over the conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater with a captivating television ad featuring a little girl with a flower, and a mushroom cloud from an atom bomb exploding behind her. The blunt message of the ad was that Goldwater's hawkish military views risked plunging the US into a catastrophic nuclear war. However, when the embattled incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, tried a similar tactic against Ronald Reagan in 1980, it fell flat.
There are two lessons to be drawn from this brief history.
First, negative ads often work, but not always. To be effective, they must tap an underlying unease among the voting public about the opposing candidate. If the image and substance of the opposing campaign forcefully contradicts the ad, it can fall short of its intended effect, or even backfire.
Second, one can say about democracy in general and an election campaign in particular what is often said ironically of the legislative process: it's like making sausage; it can be ugly to watch, but the outcome is generally satisfying.
Fledgling democracy
This brings us to the current presidential election campaign in Taiwan. Is it really as dirty and discouraging as many observers are suggesting?
Yes, the loyalty and patriotism of some candidates have been scurrilously challenged by some opposing campaigns, but this has been nothing compared to the dark days of the McCarthy (and Nixon) era in the US, when anyone left of center risked being branded a communist sympathizer and thousands of decent people were hounded out of public life.
Yes, ethnic and regional voting will figure prominently on Saturday -- but it will as well in the US.
Soong might carry 70 percent of the "mainlander" vote, but US Vice President Al Gore will carry a larger percentage of the African-American vote.
Texas Governor George W. Bush will carry the white southern vote more decisively than Chen will carry the Taiwanese southern vote.
Taipei city will split its vote more competitively than New York City.
And for that matter, regional or "ethnic" voting is considerably stronger in South Korea, where Kim Dae Jung (
What is striking about electoral politics in Taiwan today is not so much what is present as what is absent. Historically, over the course of political development in the established democracies, three types of issue cleavages beyond region, ethnicity, and personality have helped to structure the vote and the party system.
These issues revolved, first, around class and status -- the conflict between economic growth and distribution, between "haves" and "have-nots," business and labor -- and, second, around the relationship between church and state, and a host of social issues relating to personal matters such as marriage, divorce, women's rights and abortion.
More recently, these two lines of cleavage have been supplemented by a third line of cleavage having to do with what are called "post-materialist" issues: protecting the environment, improving the quality of urban life and raising the status of women and historically marginalized groups.
Cross-strait ties
?Although the three major campaigns have released position papers on these other issues, they have weighed rather little in the campaign. Rather, it has basically been driven by cross-strait relations and political reform. To the eyes of a foreign observer, the most striking aspect of the campaign discourse over cross-strait relations has not been the (heavily anticipated) drumbeat of crude threats and intimidation from China. Neither has it been the crude fear-mongering by some of the campaigns.
Rather, it has been the dramatic convergence toward the political center on the cross-strait issue -- the shift of the spectrum toward a position more accommodating than that of Lee.
Each of the three principal candidates -- Lien Chan (
None has emphatically endorsed Lee's "special state-to-state" relationship.
Who, even a year ago, would have thought that, for example, the historically pro-independence DPP could hold together behind a campaign stance on cross-strait relations in many ways more moderate than Lee's.
The dominant domestic issue has been political reform -- in essence, democracy itself. Chen and Soong have cast themselves as democratic reformers who would break up the encrusted power and privilege of the KMT and end the 50-year embrace between party and state. Each has targeted his campaign heavily on widespread public discontent with the character of government and the quality of democracy, pledging to crack down on crime, corruption, and insider dealings. Determined not to surrender the sacred ground of political reform, Lien has vowed to place the gargantuan business empire of the KMT in trust and take new initiatives to crack down on vote buying and the presence of criminals in politics.
Voters will come to different judgments as to which of the three candidates most credibly stakes claim to the centrist, "median voter" position on cross-strait relations -- a prudent embrace of the status quo, coupled with a search for new points of engagement -- and which most credibly embodies the national resolve for vigorous, cleansing reform. Many sincerely undecided voters are probably conflicted, feeling that the candidate who best fulfils the former may not be the one most likely to effect the latter.
But the striking fact to a foreign observer is how dramatically the political spectrum on these two most crucial issues has narrowed in the last stage of the campaign heads into its final week. If partisan activists feel frustrated by the blurring of differences, and if many intellectuals and voters feel disdainful of the coarse tone of the campaign, there is also a silver lining in these two paths of political convergence: the possibility in the next administration of historic breakthroughs on these two issues that most affect the future of democracy in Taiwan.
Cross-strait relations
Because of the convergence of electoral debate and public opinion, the next president will have a mandate to do two things: to preserve Taiwan's de facto sovereignty while pursuing renewed engagement with China, and to clean up the rotten elements in Taiwan's democracy.
In dealing with China, Taiwan's next president will be bound by a consensus both clearer than ever before and significantly broader, including most of what used to be the pro-independence sentiment of the DPP.
That consensus will eschew further rhetorical jabs at China in favor of practical steps to improve economic and cultural ties and the overall climate of relations.
It will accept the quiet death of the "special state-to-state relationship" if it is replaced by a seriously respectful dialogue. But it will never agree to unite its democratic political system with an authoritarian state. And, so long as it avoids any gratuitous, provocative alterations of the current status quo, it will enjoy the vigorous support of the United States.
Facing this new consensus -- irrespective of who wins the presidency -- Jiang Zemin (
The second course will be for Jiang and his aging peers, in their final years in power and on Earth, to reach for the only possible deal: some kind of cultural union with Taiwan -- call it "commonwealth" or "confederation" or whatever -- in which Taiwan would accept some symbolic diminution of sovereignty within a "greater China," while preserving all of its most crucial instruments of statehood, including the right to conduct relations with other states, the right to manage its own economy and trade, and the right to manage its own defense.
For China, the deal would have to include Taiwan's promise not to declare independence and some commitment to discuss steps toward political unification at some point in the future.
For Taiwan, the deal could not compel any future steps toward unification, and would have to involve greater space for participation in international organizations.
When former DPP chairman Shih Ming-teh (
Now the DPP, Taiwan, and the world have evolved to the point where even a President Chen would embrace such a plan if it were genuine. However, no matter such a plan might be modified, there are two basic parameters that no president on either side of the Taiwan Strait can alter: China cannot accept Taiwan independence and the people of Taiwan cannot accept political unification, at least not without true democracy in China.
The ability of elections to shape history is often overestimated -- by political scientists as much as by voters.
Things look different to a president than they do to a presidential candidate (eg, Bill Clinton's swallowing of his confrontational rhetoric on China).
The reform mandate
Whoever Taiwan's next president is, he will have a mandate, and face an acute imperative, for political reform.
As this election will affirm, Taiwan is a vigorous democracy, and has made extraordinary strides toward political openness and freedom. But its democracy is also seriously blighted by corruption, vote buying, political favoritism, and the penetration of organized crime into politics. It is a disgrace that known organized crime figures sit in parliament. These problems of corruption and criminal penetration of politics are national security problems. If not vigorously confronted, they threaten to undermine international support for Taiwan, and to provide new channels for China to compromise Taiwan's economy and governance.
As organized crime grows on China and spreads its tentacles from Hong Kong and Macau, there is the risk that the true "greater China" will be an illicit union of crime, smuggling, and corruption rather than a positively integrating union of scientific, cultural, and educational cooperation. There are also more immediate manifestations of the problem of safety and security: building codes not honored, environmental regulations not respected. The people will not be secure unless corruption and organized crime are stamped out.
Taiwan has not been short of sincere moral concern, but rhetoric is not enough. There are proven means to crack down on organized crime, involving anti-racketeering laws such as those in the US; specialized organized crime strike forces of police and prosecutors with substantial resources; and absolute autonomy for the police, the public prosecutors, the Justice Ministry, and the judiciary from political interference. In Taiwan, they also must involve erasing the immunity from prosecution of any member of parliament charged with a violent crime or with illegal membership in a criminal network.
Otherwise, Taiwan will share with Russia's failing democracy the dubious distinction of offering freedom from prosecution to ruthless crime bosses, a powerful incentive to use their criminal wealth to win electoral office. Certainly no one who is worried about preserving the freedom of speech and political action of legislators could possibly oppose a limited and carefully crafted restriction of parliamentary immunity to deal with this blight.
Additional reforms
There are numerous other political reforms that the next president -- whoever he is -- will have to consider to deepen and advance democracy in Taiwan, to place Taiwan where it must be for its own national security and economic vitality: at the cutting edge of democratic reform in Asia. Such reforms could include the following:
Dispensing with the current "single non-transferrable vote" electoral system for the Legislative Yuan, which is well known to foster factionalism, undermine party coherence, and inflate campaign costs. Any alternative would be preferable. Both the KMT and the DPP have indicated willingness to consider a combination of single-member-district voting and PR, party-list voting; thus the debate is only over how to combine the two. The next president must have the courage and imagination to negotiate, not only with his rival across the Taiwan Strait, but with his rivals in Taipei.
Empowering the Central Election Commission -- or some independent body -- to enforce the election laws with real resources to monitor vote-buying, to prosecute it, and to impose the only effective sanction: forfeiture of office.
Unless candidates are forced to accept responsibility for what their campaigns systematically do, and know that it could cost them their office, abuses will not be contained; any fines will simply be written off as "campaign costs."
There are, by the way, equivalent flaws in the US election laws, which are riddled with loopholes and lack credible enforcement mechanisms.
Empowering the Control Yuan to prosecute cases of political and bureaucratic corruption if the normal channels of prosecution do not act.
An effective system of "horizontal accountability" to control corruption requires multiple agencies that act as "fail-safe" mechanisms.
Like the Central Election Commission, the Control Yuan is now a "toothless tiger" because of its lack of independent prosecutorial authority or other ability to impose really meaningful, hurting sanctions. A serious assault on corruption must either invigorate and empower the Control Yuan or create an entirely new, independent Commission Against Corruption.
In either case, annual declarations of assets from public officials must not only be submitted, but also made available to the public.
These are only some steps a new president could embrace to reform politics in Taiwan and to deepen and invigorate its democracy.
Many others have been proposed, some of which may involve constitutional change in the scope of elections, administrative change in the methods and scope of privatization, political change to permanently sever the remaining links between party and state and separation of the KMT from active control, if not continuing ownership, of its business empire.
On Saturday, in all likelihood, more than 60 percent of the electorate will vote for candidates who made reform of the political system one of the top two priorities of their campaign.
No president will be able to ignore that majority sentiment and succeed.
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and co-director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. He is a special presidential election analyst for the Taipei Times.
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