The warm welcome given to former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) during his speaking tour of Japan exceeded most expectations. Tickets to his lectures sold out well in advance, the venues were full and his talks were greeted with repeated bursts of applause. Quite a number of Japanese legislators from both ruling and opposition parties attended. It is not often that a foreign politician gets such a reception in Japan. Lee has visited Japan many times, receiving the same warm welcome each time. It is surprising for Taiwanese to see that, although Lee’s influence in Taiwan has declined, this has not had the
Even after the change of power from Lee’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 2000, Lee remained the most influential figure on the local political scene. Any activity organized by the Friends of Lee Teng-hui (李友會) was packed, however big the venue. After 2006, however, Lee’s influence went into sharp decline. Even the people who founded the Friends of Lee Teng-hui distanced themselves from him by reorganizing and continuing under a new name — the Friends of Taiwan (台灣之友會). It is worth asking why this happened. The Friends of Taiwan was founded on the basis of Lee’s popularity. No other figure could have drawn so many people together. Why, then, did the majority of members decide to rename the group and distance themselves from Lee?
The reason for the difference in Lee’s popularity in Japan and Taiwan is that although both countries have seen a “Lee Teng-hui effect,” the underlying reasons were different. Japan ruled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. In the early days, its rule was oppressive and there were many clashes between the Japanese and the Taiwanese. But by the time of World War II, the two peoples had learned to get along, and many formed close friendships.
Following Japan’s defeat in 1945, it renounced sovereignty over Taiwan in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty. However, the Japanese government and most Japanese retained a good impression of the Taiwanese. In the 1960s, Japan faced a shortage of doctors. The Japanese came to Taiwan to recruit doctors from among Taiwanese who had received Japanese medical training. Any doctor meeting these criteria could be licensed to practice in Japan. Doctors from other places did not enjoy this privilege. This is an example of the Japanese government’s friendly attitude to Taiwanese.
Many Japanese have a good impression of the Taiwanese, and they project that sentiment onto the person of Lee Teng-hui. Lee is a Taiwanese who had a Japanese education and later became president. The Japanese saw and still see Lee as the typical Taiwanese. As long as these conditions remain, his popularity in Japan will not fade. His popularity in Taiwan, on the other hand, arose for quite different reasons. As the conditions that made him popular have changed, the extent of his influence has changed accordingly.
In the early years after it took control of Taiwan, the KMT oppressed the Taiwanese, creating a sense of injustice among the Taiwanese. Opposition activists and the DPP in its early years drew their strength from that indignation. After democracy took hold, Taiwanese no longer felt so oppressed, and their grievances faded away as time passed. This caused a bottleneck in the DPP’s development, and its votes in elections could not approach 50 percent.
Lee was the first Taiwanese president, and many people saw him as representing all Taiwanese. Following the DPP’s accession to power in 2000, the old guard within the KMT blamed Lee for their party’s defeat and put him under siege. This brought Taiwanese people’s sense of injustice to the fore once more. Most Taiwanese felt the KMT was again oppressing Taiwanese. During this period, Lee became the spiritual leader of so-called “deep greens” — those who firmly support Taiwanese independence. He also took many neutral voters with him into the green camp, allowing then president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) to win re-election in 2004 with more than 50 percent of the vote.
Later, as relations between Lee and Chen soured, Chen rushed to seize the deep-green territory, while Lee distanced himself from Chen by moving toward the political center-left. Following this shift, the KMT old guard laid off its criticism of Lee, and the public’s sense of injustice on Lee’s behalf quickly subsided. As a result, Lee’s influence also weakened. He lost his position as spiritual leader of the deep greens, and those neutral voters who had followed him into the green camp returned to their original positions.
In Japan the conditions that caused the “Lee Teng-hui effect” have not changed, so he is still as popular as ever. In Taiwan, on the other hand, the effect was brought about by the KMT old guard’s attacks on him. Now that Lee has moved away from the deep greens and the KMT old guard have stopped attacking him, the public’s sense of injustice has lessened and the Lee effect is no longer as forceful as it once was.
Chen Mao-hsiung is a professor of electrical engineering at National Sun Yat-sen University.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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