It was another grandiose Taiwanese political moment and Taipei County Commissioner Chou Hsi-wei (周錫瑋) was again there in the midst of it. After years of incompetent rule, the commissioner, with his typical flair for the dramatic, tearfully announced that he would not run for re-election. Why? It wasn’t that he did not want to run; it was just that his party, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), politely refused to let him.
Five crucial elections are coming up this December and the contest for mayor of the newly formed Sinbei City (新北市), the upgraded Taipei County, where Chou would have run, is one of them. The KMT cannot afford to lose any one of the five, but Sinbei City, as the largest administrative district, is certainly the most crucial.
Why did the KMT turn against its incumbent? It wasn’t that he was not loyal. He just happened to be incompetent and unpopular. In polls pitting Chou against any of a half-dozen potential rivals, Chou lost hands down each time.
His approval rating in the county was one of the lowest ever. People are hard-pressed to point to anything of value he has done in his years as commissioner. Yet there was Chou in tears, wondering why the party would not let him run.
This wasn’t Chou’s first dramatic moment. Those who have followed Taiwanese politics over the years remember well his embarrassing TV appearance in 2004. Immediately after the assassination attempt on then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), the KMT needed some loyal member to step up and call it a fraud. Chou was up to the task — he appeared on public TV along with a woman who refused to let her face be seen.
They boldly declared that the bullets had come from inside Chen’s jeep. Chou and the woman claimed to have watched the video replay hundreds of times until they discovered that one of the bodyguards in the back of the jeep had moved his shoulder.
That was the fatal give-away, Chou said: That man had fired the shots.
Of course, a short while later, forensic expert Henry Lee (李昌鈺), ironically brought over by the KMT to support Chou, not only found that the bullets came from outside the jeep, but demonstrated the exact trajectory and location of the shot. Yet even without going to such lengths, any analyst looking at the bullet holes in the glass could tell they came from outside.
Only an idiot or blind loyalist would think otherwise. Chou was up to the task. In reward for his loyalty the KMT machine used its extensive resources to help him win the position of Taipei County commissioner.
The tearful drama was not over, however. Enter President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). Ma is not only president of the country but also chairman of the KMT and yet in his true “I-don’t-want-to-be-responsible-or-blamed-for-anything” style, he said he knew nothing of Chou being dropped from the ballot until he read it in the paper. And so the soap opera continues: If Chou chose not to run, then why was he in tears? What will he demand in return for his loyalty? Taiwan waits to see with what position the KMT will reward the incompetent Chou.
Jerome Keating is a writer based in Taipei.
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