Paul Katz’s recent post on The China Beat is a pretty good rundown of some of the central issues surrounding the upcoming Taiwanese presidential election. He begins with what seems to be the quizzical element surrounding the election – by most measures, with Ma Ying-jeou at the helm since 2008, Taiwan has outperformed economic benchmarks during the worst global recession since the Great Depression, so why is Ma facing such a tough re-election campaign? Katz has a good round-up of the domestic economic problems that undercuts Ma’s campaign – rising inequality is one of the major problems that threatens the social fabric of Taiwanese society, which has for decades boasted of its “middle-class entrepreneurial spirit.” There are other structural problems – such as the infrastructural gap between Taipei and Taidong – that have plagued Taiwan ever since the 1950s that continue to go unnoticed by politicians in Taipei.
What Katz misses, though, is that a series of George Bush-esque gaffes have marred Ma Ying-jeou’s government and undermined his “charisma.” Ma’s Kanye West Moment (“George Bush doesn’t care about black people”) came during a heated exchange with some aboriginal tribes who were protesting a government’s policy to relocate them after the devastating Typhoon Morakot in 2009 had eroded a large portion of the mountainside and endangered their homes. Ma meant to reassure the indigenous tribes of the generosity of governmental policy, but his response (“if you move to the cities, we will treat you like humans”) instead came across as incredibly arrogant and imperialistic, suffused with “civilizing” rhetoric that sounded straight out of Han Chinese pacification campaigns of the “primitives” during the Qing dynasty. Ma’s whole handling of the Morakot disaster relief was tin-eared, as he was caught attending several wedding banquet right after the typhoon had hit. The discontent towards Ma is thus not only economic, but one rooted in long existing critiques of the KMT. What has been most galling to Ma’s critics is the complete lack of self-reflection that the administration has held in various moments of controvery. Ma’s campaign in 2008 proclaimed him as the face of a “new and improved” KMT, but his presidency has only exposed how Ma is deeply entrenched within party ideology: he’s a party man through and through. Nowhere is this more clear in a campaign ad that pushes Confucian ideology throughout the larger Chinese region.
What Katz also ignores is the saavy and truly innovative campaign of Tsai Ying-wen. Tsai represents something new in DPP politics. Whereas Chen Shuibian drew upon nativist slogans and ideology of the 1970s and 80s, and tried to construct an image of himself as the “son of Taiwan,” Tsai’s campaign has focused on her cosmopolitanism. Tsai’s first major campaign ad shows her confidently submerged in the urban jungles of Berlin and London, fully integrated but also fully ready to take on the challenges of globalization. The older generation of DPP politicians were, at their worst, populist demagogues; Tsai has very carefully cultivated her image as a deliberate, thoughtful spokesperson. And this appeals deeply to a large swath of DPP and middle-of-the road voters who were swept up by the promise of Chen Shuibian’s initial victory in 2000, but who were then disillusioned by how quickly his administration was marred in scandal after scandal.
The wildcard in all this, to me, is not the entrance of James Soong into the race. But rather, it’s the implicit at times, overt at others, discourse surrounding gender and sexuality. Debates over gender and sexuality have been more prominent in this election than ever before. The critiques of Ma Ying-jeou and his “inappropriate” relationship with Jin Pucong always border on hints of homophobia. This latent homophobia went public when the provacateur Shih Mingde demanded that Tsai Ying-wen reveal her sexual orientation earlier in the year. The rise of these overt homophobic statements is no coincidence, as earlier in the year a debate arose over the teaching of homosexuality in elementary school textbooks. The fight over equal gender and sexual rights probably won’t become major debating points for both parties as the campaign gears up, but it lies in the background to all of the campaigning as the potential for Taiwanese to vote in their first female president increasingly becomes a reality. Ever since the mid-1990s, Taiwanese politics has always had–from an American political perspective– a strange relationship of progressive political legislation on social issues such as gay rights and abortion, but deeply entrenched culturally conservative perspectives on these issues.1 I think this election could be a watershed moment in seeing whether there’s a sea-change in the cultural landscape of Taiwan. As the stage director Wu Nianzhen said in an interview,
“if one day our commander in chief presides over the annual military parade in a skirt, I think Taiwan will have took one major step forward. If we, living in such a patriarchal society, can elect a female president, then that will be a major collective achievement.”
For example, despite incredibly progressive state health care policies towards HIV/AIDS, such as completely free care, including free HAART, for HIV-positive people, the incident of the accidental transplant of HIV-positive organs in May shows how deeply a culture of shame, fear, and silence continues to plague HIV-positive people in Taiwan. ↩
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