Wednesday, 03.26.08

Unleash Ma!

Photo by Andrew Wong/Getty Images

In Taiwan's presidential contest, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang defeated Frank Hsieh of the Democratic Progressive Party by an overwhelming margin.

The Kuomintang, perhaps the strangest, most resilient political organization in history, is back in yet another guise. Ma Ying-jeou is an affable, U.S.-educated, pro-market moderate. His most distinguishing feature might be his unwillingness to use scabrous rhetoric to denounce his opponents -- highly unusual in Taiwan's shall-we-say robust public discourse.

It is difficult to imagine Mr. Ma fitting in with the Nationalist invading force that essentially conquered Taiwan at the bitter end of the Chinese civil war. Fully intending to reconquer the mainland, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang armed itself to the teeth, crushed dissent, suppressed the local dialect, and generally behaved like the worst kind of occupying army. Because most Taiwanese were descended from Chinese settlers who had fled rural poverty centuries ago, and because many of them saw the Japanese colonial rule that preceded the KMT’s arrival as relatively benign, this came as a rude shock. But under Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son, the Kuomintang struck the strongest blow it possibly could against its erstwhile Communist enemies -- it created the first Chinese liberal democracy in the world.

Whereas Mr. Ma's predecessors have been focused on fostering a separate Taiwanese identity, up to and including making formal moves towards independence, he is, in the KMT tradition, committed to the principle of Chinese reunification. And he also recognizes the economic fact that reunification has, in some sense, already happened. That is to his credit. But Mr. Ma must not shrink from going beyond pro-market moderation to speaking on behalf of China's dispossessed. In a sense, the Taiwanese nationalists let China off the hook -- in their vision, Taiwan would go its own way, and the criminal repression on the mainland would be someone else's problem. As the only elected head of state in the Chinese world, the President of Taiwan has an obligation to wage moral warfare on behalf of Tibetans, left-wing trade unionists, liberal dissidents, wrongfully accused prisoners, and China's rural poor. Thus far, Mr. Ma has been tagged as an admirably restrained, humble man. It is time for him to become much more than that.

— Reihan Salam

Filed Under: Asia, China, election, nationalism, politics, Taiwan