Party gain sticky point for China

By Harvey Stockwin

HONG KONG (JP): In the just completed elections in Taiwan, the island which China claims but does not control, the ruling nationalist party Kuomintang (KMT) has retained its grip on the crucial middle ground in politics.

In the short term the Kuomintang victory should reduce the frequency and intensity of China's threats to invade Taiwan if it declares independence. The KMT shares the Chinese communist's belief in long-term reunification.

But the election result in Taiwan's capital Taipei -- with the opposition party, the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) capturing the mayoralty from the KMT -- sharpens the long term contradiction which China has yet to resolve: choosing between economic and political reforms.

First and last, the elections were a neat rebuttal of the views that democracy is not the natural offshoot of "Asian values", a view held strongly by the Chinese Communist Party and by the former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew.

More important, the high turnout, a hefty 76 percent according to one calculation, was also, in part, a reflection of Taiwanese concern over, and rejection of, the clumsy way in which China is absorbing Hong Kong.

Beijing has promised to completely demolish the extremely modest degree of democracy in Hong Kong, established by the British, immediately upon taking over the colony on July 1, 1997.

Second, the election results demonstrated that the long ruling KMT, continuously in power since it fled to the island after losing the Chinese civil war in 1948-49, is far from becoming a spent force.

In the most glamorous contest in these polls, Taiwan's Governor James Soong, who has strongly backed the reformist policies of President Lee Teng-hui, won a comfortable victory by 1.5 million votes over his DPP rival.

Soong, who owes his political advancement more to appointment than election, was initially a rather stiff performer on the hustings. Additionally, he has the handicap of being a mainlander (someone of Chinese rather than Taiwanese descent) running in an electorate which excludes most of the mainland voters. The governorship controls local administration of all areas of Taiwan outside the two cities of Taipei and Kaohsiung, wherein most mainlanders reside.

Soong overcame both these handicaps, and must be considered a front-runner as a KMT candidate in the first-ever presidential election due in late 1995 or early 1996, -- if President Lee does not seek another term.

Governor Soong was elected by 56 percent of the electorate, with the DPP candidate securing 39 percent and the New Party failing to affect the outcome with a mere 4.3 percent of the vote.

The political situation was very different in the contest for Mayor of Taipei, with the New Party so dividing the conservative vote with the KMT that the DPP emerged the clear winner, enjoying its most significant electoral victory so far.

The new mayor is Chen Shui-bian, included last week in the U.S. Time magazine's list of 100 young rising stars worldwide. Chen emerged from what had earlier been a neck-and-neck race with 44 percent of the vote. The New Party's candidate won thirty percent of the vote, beating the KMT incumbent mayor into third place with 26 percent.

In a shrewd move, the new mayor-elect went on a walkabout through Taipei to thank the voters for their support. He thereby neatly underlined the difference between the populist DPP and the often more remote KMT, not to mention the Chinese Communist Party, for whom all modern methods of assessing and responding to the popular will are a complete anathema.

Believing in expressions of popular will, Chen and the DPP insist that one day there must be a referendum on the choice between Taiwan independence and the One-China principle. China insists that there can be no such choice.

So China, through the semiofficial China News Agency in Hong Kong, lost no time issuing a warning to the DPP. A commentary by the news agency issued on Sunday said that this and earlier DPP poll victories in Taiwan meant that in northern Taiwan at least "the heaven has already been changed". Were pro-independence sentiment to grow, the agency suggested, exchanges across the Taiwan Straits would have to be limited.

This relatively mild reaction conceals a very real and sharpening dilemma for Beijing.

Already the haphazard and unpredictable ways in which the economic rules suddenly change in China according to bureaucratic whim, plus the vagaries of law and disorder there, have diminished Taiwan investor enthusiasm for doing business on the mainland.

If China now actively attacks the growing power of the DPP, it will only add political skepticism to the existing economic skepticism. Too much antagonism towards Taiwan would be bound to reduce Taiwan's willingness to go on being the leading investor in China's economic growth.

Were Taiwan to feel constrained to reduce its leading role, investors from other countries would also certainly follow.

Thus China has sound reasons of crucial economic interest to exercise restraint in the face of the DPP democratic victory.

But the record shows that China under the communists always puts politics first, can never abandon its position that there is only One China, and has a deep antipathy to any democratic experiments within China, especially since June 1989.

So while Chen will now have to give first priority to easing Taipei's vexed pollution and congestion problems, it remains questionable whether China will give top priority to improving economic ties across the Taiwan Straits.

If Beijing puts economics first, it must tolerate the DPP, thereby encouraging the DPP's separatist tendency.

But if Beijing continues to put politics first, and continues to attack Taiwanese democracy, it will still encourage Taiwanese separatism, while diminishing China's economic prospects.