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Taiwan’s ruling DPP in crushing defeat
TAIWAN’S OPPOSITION Kuomintang (KMT) scored a
landslide win in legislative elections on 12 January. The result is a
crucial pointer to what can happen when the island votes for a new
president on 22 March. In one of history’s ironies, the Chinese regime
has high hopes that the KMT can win back the presidency after eight
years in opposition. The KMT ruled Taiwan as a one-party dictatorship
for 40 years after being defeated by Mao and the Red Army in the Chinese
civil war, until growing mass protests forced the KMT to introduce an
electoral system in the late 1980s.
In the elections to a streamlined parliament, the
Legislative Yuan, the KMT and its smaller ‘pan-blue’ allies won 86 of
113 seats. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was left with just 27
seats, a humiliating blow to president Chen Shui-bian who has ruled
Taiwan since 2000.
The cross-strait issue of China-Taiwan relations
does not seem to have been the dominant political issue in the minds of
Taiwan’s voters. Rather, the economy and growing dissatisfaction among
workers, but also sections of the middle class, over deteriorating
living standards, seem to have cost the DPP support. In that sense, this
election fits a recent regional pattern from Japan, Australia, South
Korea and Thailand, of sitting governments (or military dictators in the
latter case) being punished at the polls.
"It is clear that people are yearning for change
after eight years of suffering", KMT presidential candidate, Ma Ying-jeou,
said to the sound of fireworks and champagne corks popping at the
party’s Taipei headquarters. But rather than a vote of confidence in the
KMT to turn Taiwan’s economy around, the election was a devastating
rejection of the DPP, and a feeling that the KMT could hardly be worse!
A survey published in early January by CommonWealth
Magazine revealed the groundswell of discontent building up. Seventy-two
percent of the people interviewed said they were dissatisfied with
Taiwan’s economic performance, the highest such rate in five years: 85%
said the widening gap between rich and poor had become a serious issue.
Close to 60% replied that "the present economic downturn was the
greatest crisis facing Taiwan".
This is a crushing indictment of eight years of DPP
rule, during which the economy has enjoyed average growth over 4%. The
DPP evolved from the anti-dictatorship protests of the 1980s and was,
before it took power, considered a ‘social democratic’ party with an
influential leftwing. But its rise to power was accompanied by a rapid
shift to the right and full acceptance of neo-liberal policies –
privatisation, deregulation and casualisation – underpinned by WTO
membership (under the name ‘Chinese Taipei’) just one month after China
joined, in December 2001. DPP governments have attempted to privatise
large sections of the economy especially in banking, telecomms and
utilities. Railway workers staged angry protests in November, and
threatened a national strike this year against privatisation-related
attacks. These attacks have been accompanied by a wave of corruption
scandals involving top DPP politicians including relatives of president
Chen himself. Corruption inside the KMT, endemic since before its
arrival on the island in 1949, was a crucial factor behind it losing
power to the DPP eight years ago.
The results do not signify any real enthusiasm or
solid support for the KMT. "At least part of the KMT success owes to a
vote against the DPP as incumbents", commented the Taipei Times (14
January). Voter turnout in these elections was less than 57%, the lowest
in legislative elections for 35 years (under the KMT dictatorship). As
the Taipei Times also noted, this "indicates widespread alienation among
Taiwan’s voters. The numbers attending campaign rallies were also quite
low". Other reports pointed to a particularly low turnout among younger
voters.
The national question inside Taiwan is extremely
complex, with powerful emotions aroused on both sides of the pro- or
anti-China divide. But 68% of the population, according to one recent
poll, want to keep the ‘status quo’ – ie the current, legally ambiguous
status of self-rule, while not formally breaking the connection with
China. Fear of a horrific war is one reason for this, as is the growing
perception that economic ties with China are a fact of life. In the
first eleven months of 2007, China absorbed more than 40% of Taiwan’s
total exports. An estimated one million Taiwanese, 4.3% of its
population, either work or live in mainland China.
These factors have meant that Chen’s attempts to
whip up pro-independence fervour have not met with the same level of
popular support as in the early years of his presidency. An additional
factor is that China’s rulers have opted to keep a low profile in this
and other recent elections, having seen that threats and attempts to
browbeat the Taiwanese into voting for Beijing’s preferred candidates
invariably backfire. But there is also growing scepticism towards Chen
and other capitalist politicians, both ‘pan-blue’ (pro-China) and
‘pan-green’ (pro-independence), because they use the cross-strait issue
as a diversion, an excuse for whipping up nationalist emotion, while
pursuing the same neo-liberal policy of attacking the working class and
the poor.
The tragedy of the situation is that there is no
‘red’ alternative – a democratic socialist workers’ party – to the
pan-blue and pan-green capitalist blocs. Voters are faced with a choice
between two blocs that stand for the same capitalist policies to make
the rich richer and the poor poorer. Even on the cross-strait issue, the
DPP and KMT have moved closer towards each other under the pressure of
their big-business backers.
The KMT has in practice abandoned reunification as a
policy, saying this is an ‘eventual’ aim. The DPP has also abandoned
independence as an immediate strategy, opting instead for high-profile
stunts such as UN membership for Taiwan, and renaming streets and
monuments as a kind of ‘surrogate independence’. The DPP’s presidential
candidate and former prime minister, Frank Hsieh, has echoed KMT
policies, saying he would lift investment bans that prevent Taiwanese
companies placing more than 40% of their capital on the mainland. Hsieh
is known to be a ‘sceptic’, as far as independence is concerned, who
basically goes through the motions as this is still official DPP policy.
But it is the KMT and its candidate, Ma, that have
the official blessing of the Beijing regime. To punish the DPP for its
pro-independence posturing, Beijing has made clear it will only deal
with a KMT administration. In this way it uses the mainland’s increased
economic weight as a ‘carrot’ before the Taiwan capitalists in
particular. Again, Beijing is showing some discretion of late for fear
that a too open display of support for Ma and the KMT could drive many
Taiwanese into voting for the DPP out of fear that a KMT vote will mean
greater involvement by Beijing over Taiwan’s affairs.
There is no doubt that if, as now seems very likely,
Ma is elected in March, a new chapter will open up in the stormy history
of cross-strait relations. Paradoxically, even with a big win for Ma, it
may not go as smoothly as Beijing hopes.
For a start, Ma’s promise to ‘reconstruct the
economy’ will be put to the test. While there is widespread support for
direct transportation links with the mainland and increased cross-strait
tourism, Ma’s policy of lifting all restrictions on capital flows could
soon run into a popular backlash if jobs and investment are seen to
flood out of Taiwan. This, of course, is what the capitalists want:
increased profits on the backs of cheaper, unorganised labour, but also
to use the mainland workforce as a stick to beat down the wages, welfare
benefits and trade union rights of Taiwanese workers.
In the absence of a mass socialist party that could
offer an inspiring example to workers on the mainland, just as the KMT
has been revived as a result of the DPP’s unpopularity so too can the
DPP make a comeback in the period ahead. If the global crisis of
capitalism now unfolding pulls the Chinese economy into recession, this
could have a calamitous impact on Taiwan. In this situation, the general
support that exists today for closer integration with China could
evaporate, giving way to powerful protectionist moods in Taiwan that a
revamped DPP would lose no time in exploiting. This could blow new life
into the cross-strait conflict, with economic tensions inevitably
spilling over into political, diplomatic and possibly even military
ones.
What is needed is an independent political voice for
Taiwanese and Chinese workers, to fight against neo-liberal
globalisation – which is also now the credo of China’s ‘communist’
rulers. A genuine democratic socialist party would counter-pose with
‘closer links’ of the oppressed, based on common struggle regardless of
national frontiers, to the ‘closer links’ based on exploitation,
favoured by the capitalists and their politicians on both sides of the
Taiwan Strait.
Vincent Kolo
chinaworker.info
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