taiwan-elections_0

A Game of Image Building

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“Taiwan cannot afford to be without an opposition voice or be without checks and balances. You can cry, but do not feel discouraged. You can feel sorrow, but never give up. For this election result, I take full responsibility and resign,” said Tsai Ing-wen in her concession speech after the recent Taiwan presidential elections.   

A steady stream of tears flowed down my cheeks when I learnt the news that she had lost the election, and I couldn’t help but feel deep sorrow for her, as she came so close to winning. An unbelievably strong sense of pity overwhelmed me on my way back to town.   

Thinking back, I find it interesting, even surprising that I became so emotionally attached to this political game. I was assigned to follow the electoral campaign at the spur of the moment and I had been there for only three days, taking just a passing glance. As a parachuting journalist, I was not supposed to share such a strong bond as that of her supporters along the way.    

The top two favourite candidates in the election were incumbent Ma Ying-jiu, and the challenger Tsai Ing-wen.  Both worked hard to impress voters with their integrity, intimacy and responsibility despite having diverse opinions on cross-strait relationships and economics. But what particularly concerned most reporters inside and outside the island was whether or not Taiwan could make history by electing its first-ever female president. Such expectations certainly gave Tsai an advantage.    

Meanwhile, the current voting behaviour has altered the entire electoral landscape of Taiwan. In the old days, whether or not a candidate won an election depended heavily on the financial resources that a political party was able to allocate to ‘buying’ votes. The richer party was, the greater chance of winning.    

But today things have changed. Most voters are inclined to be candidate-oriented rather than party-oriented and only if a candidate knows how to make good use of mass media in political campaigns, showing off his or her personal charm, can he or she then win the support of the majority. Hence, image-making campaigns have become crucial.  Polishing a candidate’s image to appear as shiny as possible is inevitably the key to winning.    

Tsai’s strong credibility began with what became known as the ‘Three Little Pigs’ movement, a controversy ignited by a small Taiwanese boy who handed over his coin-filled piggy bank to Tsai. The government afterwards declared the donation illegal because it violated a prohibition on the involvement of minors in political campaigns. This in turn triggered a huge controversy, but also did Tsai a big favour, coining the phrase ‘piggy-bank campaign’ which came to represent her stance against big corporate money in the election.    

The idea of this piggy-bank campaign was that by banding together to make small donations, tens of thousands of economically challenged workers and farmers could overcome the big bad wolf of Taiwanese corporate power and defeat incumbent Ma Ying-jiu and his supposedly capitalist cronies. By portraying the KMT as a political party for corporations and the rich, Tsai built her campaign around such issues as the class divide, the rich-poor gap and north-south disparity. Her competence and leadership broke the typical stereotypes of women and established a convincing image of rationality.   Interestingly, both the KMT and the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), showed respect for electoral fairness and corruption was rarely seen in this election.  Another development in this campaign was that the political leanings of older parents who are stubbornly in favour of a certain party, were unlikely to have influenced the votes of their children, who now have own their own thoughts and don’t blindly follow a particular politician just because their parents do.    

The electoral defeat of Chen Chih-chung (son of former president Chen Shui-bian) is an apt example of the fact that simply being related to a legendary “grassroots hero”, no longer guarantees the success. And radical slogans, such as “If you do not support me, you do not love Taiwan” (Bian’s favourite petition), are not appropriate in today’s campaigns. Hence a candidate’s image has to be shaped in a more rational manner, which shows that the quality of the electoral process has greatly improved with the passage of time.   

During my short visit to Taiwan I spoke with a number of people on the street about their opinions.  Denise Chiu, a Taiwanese American who prides herself on always keeps a close eye on political issues in her home country, gave an interesting insight into Tsai’s image-building. She points out that Tsai shares a number of striking similarities with Huang Rong, a fictional heroine in Jin Yong’s novel The Legend of Condor Heroes who also inadvertently played a key role in a time of crisis, and whose well-educated and wealthy background was quite out of tune with her grassroots followers.    

“Traditionally, each leader-to-be of a street gang in the novel had to undergo a spitting ceremony, in which Huang tolerated being spat on by each gang member before she came to power. The path that Tsai went through to be the chairlady of the DPP was somehow the same to some extent, and that’s their way to gain respect,” Denise explains.   

In her eyes Tsai’s rise to prominence probably met the needs of the evolution of DPP, and she aimed to stamp out any under the table deals within the party. Most of the prominent party members have been to jail or shed blood in defence of DPP’s common interest, and they have been together through thick and thin, or even suffered the loss of best friends on the way to their rise to power. But Tsai has been with the party for just seven years and she hasn’t experienced what most of the big leaders have gone through, and thus she wasn’t as hindered by the burden of the past, Chiu observes.    

Yet Tsai led the DPP camp through the worst of adversity. Many commentators once forecast that the disastrous failure in last presidential election in 2008 would be the end of the world for the DPP. Tsai confessed in a TV interview that she was at home watching a Korean soap drama with her parents on Election Day 2008 as she didn’t want to touch politics. She never imagined that she would be nominated and have to tackle all matters of conflict within the camp. Owing nobody a debt of gratitude meant that nobody was going to back her up, and that was also an unhealthy, subtle rule to play the game in Taiwan, and that’s why Tsai had been on her own to restructure the camp, Denise explains.    Tsai was once isolated by her partisans and that unfavourable situation originally concerned Chiu, but it eventually came to be her advantage. Power corrupts people. Denise takes the imprisoned ex-president as an example. As a small potato in his rural village, Bian had to “take care” of those who had been fighting for him to win the throne and offer them “compensations” afterwards.    

“That’s how corruption gets started. Hence it was only Tsai who could turn things around, simply because she did not control any factional resources of the party.”  

“The candidates the party sent for the previous elections were all some sort of ‘stakeholders’ and thus they could not draw a clear line when it came to conflict of interest. They were likely to compromise, but Tsai wouldn’t, or didn’t have to,” Denise says.  Unlike those big politicians whose image was always conventionally dramatic, rough and aggressive, Tsai was more inclined to follow her heart to speak and behave, and Denise noticed that the way she addressed her speech was quite scholarly, soft and gentle and somehow lacking an imposing manner, yet still being very true to herself.    “Interestingly, after a string of campaigns, Tsai adjusted the style of her speech a bit as a way of creating a more inspiring and passionate atmosphere for her supporters.”    

The top two candidates had a fierce competition of image-building and it was hard to decide the winner; however in terms of experience on governance, Tsai was less favourable.    For another local Taiwanese resident Edison Chen, who has recently returned from the mainland back to his home country, this was a problem for Tsai.   “She is not from the grassroots and she has never been a legislator or a mayor. Expertise in a particular subject doesn’t go far enough to be president. She has to show us her competence at managing all challenges in all fields.”    

Though Tsai painted a beautiful election platform, the absence of a clear blueprint for how to realize them all was not convincing enough for his vote.  But incumbent Ma Ying-jiu was just the opposite; he has gone through all the necessary positions and therefore Edison had great confidence that he could improve the economy.  

Right before the election, Ma also showed his trump card – Taiwan’s First Lady Zhou Mei-qing, whom Edison admires greatly for her austerity. Usually taking a back seat and playing a very low-key role, the First Lady appeared on the Taiwanese National Day last year wearing a very simple, old dress.  

This attracted a lot of compliments.  Zhou is renowned for leading a very modest and restrained lifestyle, even catching public buses, which suggests to voters that the rich never forgot the poor, and that was definitely icing on the cake for Ma’s image. Edison articulates that if the next presidential election were a war between the First Lady and Tsai, the competition would be much more inspiring, interesting and fiercer.   

On the other hand, Lee I-cheng, a former businessman from Taichung, felt uncomfortable when Ma didn’t object to  being referred to simply as “Mr. Ma”, rather than as “President” during a dialogue of cross-strait relations with Chen Yun-lin, the chairman of a Beijing-based association. Lee felt ashamed to see Taiwan’s sovereignty being dwarfed and doubted if large enterprises were the biggest gainers of the “1992 consensus” behind the curtain. The livelihood of the lower-middle classes is getting more and more difficult, and the starting salary offered to a fresh graduate in 2012 is 22,000 NT dollars, which is worse than a decade ago. Lee can’t help wondering who is benefitting from the rise in GDP.   

Observing that most large Taiwanese companies have moved to the mainland to develop their businesses, Denise Chiu also argues that agriculture is currently the only way out. However the Congress whose seats were mostly occupied by KMT partisans passed the amendment on Land Acquisition Ordinance prior to the election, saying that it was lawful for the government to execute land acquisitions and foreclosures for any reason.    

“How dare Ma turn a blind eye to this issue; I can’t imagine what will happen after he is re-elected!” Denise says.   

Regardless of which candidate is the best for Taiwan, living in a democratic society, we must be tolerant of all sorts of diverse opinions, and that’s the way to achieve harmony. “It doesn’t really matter that one hundred people have one hundred different things to say as long as they are mutually respected by one another. That’s how we define HARMONY.”.   

Perhaps when voters are misled by the false images that a candidate presents during their campaigns and therefore choose the wrong one, this is not the fault of voters, Denise stresses.     

“Taiwan is a democratic country. If you do wrong to  us, we will take you down and that’s the game. This time I may not have chosen the right one, then I can go for another next time, and this is democracy. Who on earth can guarantee that the people will vote for the right one forever? None of us can. This is not our [the voter’s] responsibility to ensure it. We just have to vote.”    

“When Ma’s government controlled the majority of the parliament, he had all the advantages but still failed to do a good job, so why do we still support him?”    

My trip is long since passed, but I am still passionately drawn to this definition of HARMONY. I am quite envious of the Taiwanese and I lament that our democratic process here in Macau has been trampled on for so long and so mercilessly by our so-called “sunshine” government. But what a shame it is, we don’t even have any ability to not support him. 

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