Sat, Sep 12, 2015 page3

• Presidential race reflects women’s rise in politics

  ON THEIR OWN: Legislative seats were mandated for women in 1951. The DPP decided in the 1990s that 25% of its nominees had to be women and the KMT followed

  • By Austin Ramzy / NY Times News Service, TAIPEI
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  The people of Taiwan appear poised to elect their first female president. Two of the three leading candidates in the January election, including the nominees of both major parties, are women.

  Women have led other Asian nations, but they have largely followed in the footsteps of male relatives. Not in this case. Rather, analysts say, the race reflects the fact that Taiwan does a better job of putting women into political office than just about anywhere else in the world.

  Taiwan “amazed me when I first started looking at it,” said Joyce Gelb, a professor emeritus at the City University of New York who researches women in politics. “It’s second only to the Scandinavian countries, which are the bellwethers of women’s representation. I think it’s very impressive.”

  

  Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen, center, holds hands with DPP legislative candidates Hsiao Bi-khim, right, and Liu Chao-hao yesterday at a campaign event in Taipei.

  Photo: CNA

  Explanations for the rise of women within Taiwan’s political class abound, including the matriarchal traditions of some Aboriginal tribes and the promotion of women’s education during the Japanese colonial period.

  However, the most influential factor, academics say, is a series of quotas that have gradually been imposed to ensure that women are represented in government. While the origin of the policies goes back decades, it was only after the advent of multiparty politics in the 1980s that women began to make significant strides.

  The front-runner in the campaign is Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), 59. She lost her first bid for the presidency in 2012, but she has maintained a strong lead in polls this time. Her chief rival, from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), is Deputy Legislative Speaker Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), 67.

  The contest contrasts sharply with the situation scarcely more than 161km away in China, which has had a dearth of female leaders, despite a Chinese Communist Party ideology that emphasizes the importance of women to society. Only two of the country’s 25 politburo members are women, and none has reached the top echelon of political power, the Politburo Standing Committee.

  Elsewhere in the region, South Korean President Park Geun-hye is the daughter of the man who held that office from 1962 to 1979. Former Philippine president Corazon Aquino was the wife of a senator, and her successor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is the daughter of a former president. Bangladeshi President Sheikh Hasina is a daughter of the country’s first president, and its former prime minister Khaleda Zia was the wife of a former president.

  However, in Taiwan, neither Tsai nor Hung has a family connection to a prominent male politician.

  Efforts to bring more women into the political system began when the 1951 Constitution set aside a small number of legislative seats for women in what was then an authoritarian state. By the time democratization began, the idea that women should have a certain level of participation was already well-established.

  Democratization also coincided with a growing feminist movement, and women played a crucial role in organizing against the authoritarian government in the 1970s and 1980s.

  The first and biggest opposition group, the DPP, set its own minimums for gender representation in 1996, decreeing that one-quarter of its nominees for elected office had to be women. Two years later, it expanded that quota to candidates for elected party positions.

  “The DPP is, after all, a party that started from social movements of advancing political and social rights and equality, so it’s natural that gender rights were part of the platform,” said Ketty Chen (陳婉宜), senior deputy director of the party’s department of international affairs.

  The KMT introduced similar quotas after it lost the 2000 presidential election.

  In 2005, the Constitution was changed to set aside 15 percent of seats in the legislature for women. Since then, the level of women’s representation has climbed steadily, to 33.6 percent after the last election in 2012, from 21.3 percent in 2004, according to statistics compiled by Huang Chang-ling (黃長玲), an associate professor of political science at National Taiwan University.

  Huang says the reserved seats helped bring increasingly competitive female candidates into politics.

  “I’d argue that, thanks to gender quotas or women’s reserved seats, Taiwanese are now quite familiar with female faces in politics,” she said.

  Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯), a spokeswoman for Hung’s campaign, said the strong presence of women in the coming election is part of a global trend.

  “In countries around the world, there have been more and more women in politics recently, like [former US secretary of state] Hillary Clinton and [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel,” she said. “This shows that in politics, gender is no longer a glass ceiling. Having two women as candidates for the two parties, the KMT and DPP, bears this out.”

  Yet while a victory by either would be groundbreaking for Taiwan, that possibility is not an important issue in the campaign, in another sign of how familiar female candidates have become here.

  “At the end of the day, the gender question is decidedly secondary,” said Nathan Batto, a political scientist at Academia Sinica. “The question in this election, as with every election in Taiwan, is fundamentally about Taiwan’s relationship with China. The fact that both major candidates are women doesn’t change the fact that the real thing that divides them is very different ideas about what Taiwan’s relationship with China should be.”

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