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Iran in Latin America: Threat or Axis of Annoyance?
Senior Fellow Douglas Farah's analysis of the debate over the level of threat posed by Iran's expanding diplomatic, trade and military presence in Latin America, and its stated ambition to continue to broaden these ties.
Chinese Naval Modernization: Altering the Balance of Power
Richard Fisher details China's naval modernization program and the potential impacts on U.S. interests in the Western Pacific.
Coming in Taiwan: Major Electoral Realignment
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Now that Taipei’s Mayor Ma Ying-jeou has defeated Legislative speaker Wang Jynping in the race to succeed Lien Chan as chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, a major realignment of voting patterns in Taiwan appears close to inevitable.
Ma’s predecessor, Lien Chan, crowned his career with a visit to China, during which he said much about one China and very little about freedom or democracy. Hu Jintao was pleased to receive him. He rewarded him not, as Lien’s circle had hoped, by beginning to withdraw (withdraw, not destroy) the seven hundred or so missiles now emplaced to threaten Taiwan. What Lien got, in fact, was the offer of . . . a panda, which Taiwan is not prepared to receive, and which comes under the rules that govern movements of endangered species. (And what if the panda does come to Taiwan, and then dies there?) All in all, Lien got very little in return. The same has been true of the subsequent visits by James Soong, of the People First Party, and Yu Muming of the New Party, which with the Kuomintang hold a razor thin majority in the legislature.
Now Ma Ying-jeou, only 55 years old, who was born in Hong Kong but arrived in Taiwan as an infant, has been passed the torch of leadership by the voters of the Nationalist Party, who humiliated Wang by delivering a crushing seventy plus percent victory to Ma.
Ma is a talented, hard working, and incorrupt politician, who received advanced degrees in law from Harvard and taught himself to speak near flawless English (He served as President Chiang Ching-kuo’s English language secretary). He is blessed with the proverbial “movie star good looks.” Sadly, however, he speaks the local language, Taiwanese, only with a heavy accent.
Technically Ma is a “waisheng ren”—a “mainlander”—someone who came with Chiang Kai-shek in the late 1940s. But unlike those who were already grown when they took refuge in Taiwan, and therefore based their careers not so much on who they were but on who they had been in China, Ma has made his entire political career in Taiwan—a successful career by any measure, though confined to the Taipei city area, where the mainlander vote is strongest.
If Ma is to succeed, and perhaps win the presidency in 2008, his most important task will be to renounce the legacy of China travel and so forth that Lien and others have created. The Taiwanese are not inclined to elect a mainlander: all the presidents since the death of Chiang Ching-kuo have been native Taiwanese. And Beijing’s kiss is, in Taiwan, fatal. Beijing made a terrible mistake a year ago when they refused a visa to Ma, the one mainlander who might succeed in Taiwan politics—while welcoming a stream of has beens, having little if any influence.
But Ma depends, or imagines he depends, upon senior mainlander power brokers, that instead of breaking decisively with Lien—whom many Taiwanese now view as little better than a traitor—he has made him honorary chairman of the party. Furthermore, he has accepted and reciprocated good wishes from the Chinese dictator Hu Jintao, but not from the elected president of his own country, Chen Shuibian.
So Ma’s first moves suggest that he has not grasped the absolute necessity of abandoning the “China card” if he is to succeed in Taiwan.
Second, Wang Jynping, accustomed to winning elections and brokering deals in the legislature, has been utterly humiliated by the election. In it he presented himself as, in effect, more Catholic than the Pope, excoriating the idea of Taiwan independence, seeking votes from the mainlanders, and so forth (and to be fair, many of them, including Lien, evidently voted for him). But what is he to do now?
It makes no sense that the Kuomintang, a party overwhelmingly composed of Taiwanese, most of who joined when it was the only legal party on the island, should follow a policy of uniting with China rather than looking after their own country’s interests. One suspects that Wang may feel almost betrayed—having done his utmost to make himself acceptable to the party’s pro-China faction, he has been slapped down in complete humiliation. He shows no signs of wishing to work with Ma,
At the same time, many grassroots Kuomintang organizations are also expressing skepticism about Ma. After sixty years in Taiwan, it should, they believe, be a Taiwanese party.
So one of two things will happen:
The more likely is that Ma, for all his determination and character, will be unable to reform the Kuomintang, or genuinely and convincingly change the suicidal China policy of Lien Chan and his colleagues. It this is the case, then members will gradually leave, the legislative balance will change, and Ma will fail to achieve national success.
The other is that Ma will actually manage to persuade the people of Taiwan that he can be trusted, purge the gangster and other elements from his party, and fundamentally reconstruct it. He will have to shift clearly to a pro-Taiwan approach, support the purchase of arms from the US that the KMT has been irresponsibly blocking in the legislature, and engage Hu Jintao—if he does so at all—not with talk of the minzu, the race, but rather with talk about democracy, freedom, and self-determination.
Were Ma to do that, he might emerge as a power to be reckoned with, not only in Taiwan, but in China as well.
