That Taiwanese were supposed to love the KMT, cherish their Chinese roots and yearn for reunification with China has been widely seen as a fiction of the martial law era, exposed as such by the rapid development of a Taiwanese national consciousness since that era's end. This, however, is an oversimplification, almost a caricature, of the truth. There are at least some Chinese "nationalists" who are Taiwanese and the most prominent of them is Vice President Lien Chan (連戰). This huge difference between Lien and President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) means that a KMT victory on Saturday may well usher in a very different regime in May from the one Taiwanese overwhelmingly endorsed four years ago.
A hybrid inheritance
Lien's interesting mixture of a Taiwanese consciousness mixed with impeccable nationalist credentials are a family inheritance. His grandfather, Lien Heng (
Lien Heng's interpretation of history has long been challenged by nativist historians who claim that as an overseas immigrant society there had always been something distinctly different about Taiwan. Lien Heng's approach resembles trying to interpret the growth of Australia or pre-revolutionary US entirely according to the adoption and spread of English values. But for Lien Chan, his grandfather's work both identified the family strongly with Taiwan -- Lien Chan himself has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the island -- while at the same time inculcating a cherishing of Chinese culture.
After Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, Lien Heng, like many of the island's literati, found living under the Japanese yoke intolerable and went to Xiamen in 1905 to work for Sun Yat-sen's (孫中山) Revolutionary Alliance. There followed a number of crossings and recrossings of the Taiwan Strait by the family, always chafing at Japanese rule in Taiwan, always unable to settle permanently on the mainland.
It is for this reason that Lien Chan was born in Xian, in China's Shanxi province, in 1936. His mother was an educator from Shenyang Province. They lived in China until 1946, when the family returned to Taiwan after Japan's defeat in WWII. Lien arrived in Taiwan unable to speak Hokkien, and although he has long been fluent, has retained an accent to this day. While the family returned to Tainan, Lien was schooled in Taipei and his connections with Tainan, his ancestral home, have always been slight.
If Lien Chan's grandfather had the reputation of a patriotic scholar, his father, Lien Chen-tung (連震東), was very much involved in government. After the KMT government relocated to Taiwan, Lien Chen-tung was a major figure in both the land reform movement -- one of the most successful ever carried out anywhere -- and a prime supporter of local self-government.
A blueblood
Lien Chan was therefore something of a KMT blueblood. While Taiwanese, his family had impeccable nationalist credentials and were trusted within the KMT as being utterly free from both the taint of collaboration with the Japanese and any lurking pro-Taiwan independence sentiment. They enjoyed a prominent place in the post-1949 regime and it was only natural that as the KMT began to accept that young Taiwanese eventually had to be brought into government in significant numbers, one of the first attendees at a special course at the party's cadre school in the mid 1970s should be Lien Chan himself.
By this time Lien had been in the US for 10 years, first studying at the University of Chicago, then teaching political science at the universities of Wisconsin and Connecticut. In 1968 he was headhunted by the government, which was trying to persuade leading overseas scholars to return to Taiwan for public service. Lien became a visiting professor at the Department of Political Science at National Taiwan University in 1968, then became director of that university's Graduate Institute of Political Science.
Lien's subsequent rise through the party and government ranks has been remarkable (see box, right). But there is one thing that does not appear on Lien's general resume. In the late 1960s Lee Huan (
Nurtured by the old guard
To some degree this gives the lie to the commonly held idea that Lien is Lee Teng-hui's protege. In fact, he was a seedling carefully cultivated by the KMT old guard.
It is this, perhaps, that might explain something else quite remarkable about Lien's career path: the apparent effortlessness of its upward trajectory, notwithstanding an apparent lack of any substantial achievement.
Lien's official biographer might disagree with this; the biography is full of such landmarks as Lien's establishing diplomatic ties with the Bahamas while foreign minister or launching the express mail delivery system while at the Ministry of Transportation and Communications.
Cite these as achievements, however, to Taipei's political cognoscenti, as this writer has done, and your only reward is a smile. Lien has had a charmed career, having avoided the toughest jobs and mostly staying in each post just long enough to get a taste of the job before being shuffled onward and upward. Almost the only thing for which Lien has obtained distinction is his forcing through of the National Health Insurance Program in 1995 in the face of huge opposition from the healthcare sector and his own Cabinet, and the launching of the Asia Pacific Regional Operations Plan the same year -- which, despite its persistently missed deadlines, succeeded in considerably opening up Taiwan's economy.
It is interesting to compare Lien's career with his would-be nemesis, James Soong. For over a decade Soong was on the frontlines of the KMT's battle against the "tang wai" ("outside the party" political activists), earning him a reputation as an efficient thug. "Soong was in the kitchen of KMT politics, actually sweating over the cooking; Lien, on the other hand, was decidedly `front of the house' -- all his jobs have been `white tie,'" says someone who knows both of the men well.
Lien's progress represents a careful nurturing. His patrician background gave him all the necessary polish to be an ambassador, while the ambassador post itself gave the academic Lien confidence in his political skills. Then he rose through a number of jobs that were virtual sinecures but allowed him to learn the way that the party, and later the Cabinet worked. Then more diplomacy to put him in a senior Cabinet role, Taiwan provincial governor, a training for the premiership and ultimately the premiership itself.
It wasn't just astute placement that gave Lien an easy ride. He was also lucky. It is a grim but well-known joke that transportation ministers usually spend a lot of time in hospitals and funeral parlors, comforting the injured and the bereaved resulting from Taiwan's dreadful civil aviation record. Lien managed five years in the post without having to face a major accident.
He also benefited from the evolution of the KMT regime. After CCK's death, Lee Teng-hui, knowing that the game was up for Taiwan's old-fashioned anti-communism and wanting the importantly symbolic post of foreign minister held by a Taiwanese, appointed Lien as a standard-bearer for the new "pragmatic diplomacy." Lien had no problem with pragmatic diplomacy, despite his conservative KMT background. He had, prior to Taiwan's being expelled from the US in 1971, advocated acceptance of a "two-China" policy which would allow Taiwan to keep its seat even if China was admitted. But Lien's realization that Taiwan could only lose in zero sum games with Beijing does not make him a Taiwan nationalist of the same stripe as Lee Teng-hui.
Personality traits
What sort of a person is Lien? A scion of Taiwanese gentry, his strong nationalist background makes him more at ease with mainlanders than Taiwanese and more comfortable among the wealthy rather than the middle class -- for which reason he is incidentally not popular either among academics or the entrepreneurs who form Taiwan's economic backbone, the small and medium enterprises. Lien is highly cultured, a gourmet, a good drinker, exceptionally well-read -- especially in the field of international affairs -- affable, witty, generous, a good friend but also, say those who know him, lazy.
Unfortunately, some of Lien's best qualities do not show themselves in public, where he has an image of icy aloofness. He does not have the common touch like Lee Teng-hui, nor does he see much of a need to interact with people outside of his circle. The recent book A Cross-Century Successor (跨世紀的接班人) contains several anecdotes relating to this. For instance, on the campaign trail with James Soong in 1994, Lien would press the flesh for a few minutes and then retire to have a rest. Soong, on the other hand, just went on and on, working the crowd. At a flag-raising ceremony in Chungho on Constitution Day last December, Lien arrived 30 minutes early, but rather take the time to work the crowd -- it was, after all, supposed to be a campaign opportunity -- he just chatted to the officials around him.
Then there is the well-known story of Lien's NT$600 boxed meals and his having the police restrict traffic on Taipei's Jenai Road so that he could go home for lunch. Many of these stories show an indifference to ordinary people.
Partly this is, of course, a function of Lien's background. Raised in privilege, it is not that Lien is greatly self-centered, just that the concerns of the hoi polloi have never had to intrude on his radar except in terms of policy. Lien dislikes hamming for the cameras, the kind of grandstanding that is part and parcel of democratic politics. But that does not mean he is without feeling or humor. In Xian the first school he attended was the Tso-hsiu ("cultivating young shoots") Primary School (作秀小學) but the war forced him to change schools after a year. Latterly, the expression "tso-hsiu" in Mandarin is used as a slang term for "to make a show" using the phonetic similarity to the English word. No wonder he has problems with his public image, Lien quips, since he never graduated from Tso-hsiu Primary.
The trusting and the trusted
Lien's chilly demeanor might be a problem in getting elected. But it is his trusting character and the laziness that gives him an enthusiasm to delegate, which might well pose a bigger problem if he gets elected. Lien does not like to tire himself with work; he sees himself as a final decision-maker rather than a hands-on policy creator. Officials who have worked for him have praised him in the past for the latitude he gives them. The problem is that, in being so hands-off, Lien is at the mercy of the quality of those officials on which he relies. Given that he tends to idealize Taiwan's political environment as a law-abiding western-style democracy -- never having had to deal with grassroots party business -- the way is open for canny villains of the strip of Wu Tse-yuan, (
Another problem for Lien is his inability to say no. It is possible that this might even cost him the election, since it was his reluctance to deny access to the campaign platform at a Feb. 25 rally in Pingtung to Luo Fu-chu (羅福助), the self-styled "spiritual leader" of the Tiendaomeng, an organized crime group, that led to Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲), a man of tremendous moral authority, throwing in his lot with the DPP's Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).
`A good clubman'Given that Lien is not an ideologue, it is simply wrong to think of him as a spiritual heir to Lee Teng-hui. Lien desires above all a spirit of affability and good fellowship. He would be what in England before WWII was called "a good clubman." He lacks any burning sense of right and wrong and wants to be friends with as many people as possible. In this sense, Lien is opposed to the bitter divisions within the KMT of the Lee years, and probably agrees with the US that Lee is, as far as China goes, a "troublemaker."
Lien is in this sense absolutely different from his so-called mentor. Lee has little appreciation of China, and his critical views are those of an educated Japanese. Lien is a Chinese nationalist who, whatever the problems across the Taiwan Strait, sees Taiwan's link with China as something that should be held sacrosanct, something the cutting of which will leave Taiwanese cultural orphans. In this sense, he resembles a Tory from the American revolution.
Prospects
What can Taiwan expect if Lien wins? A Lien presidency will concentrate on healing the various rifts in the KMT caused by Lee Teng-hui's attempt to shift that party from its roots. It will also seek some kind of accommodation with China on the basis of a shared commitment to nationalism. He will probably try to rejuvenate the APROC plan, believing that the internationalization of Taiwan's economy is useful both economically and strategically. Will he carry out his plan to put the KMT's assets in trust? It's difficult to say. The political scientist academic in him tells him that this must be done. His lack of desire to engender squabbling in the party would mitigate against it. The same could be said of reform of the electoral system, something Lien has talked about over the years. Will he do much on the "black gold" question? Once again, his desire to avoid trouble will conflict with his better judgment.
Tomorrow, a profile of independent candidate James Soong; on Thursday, DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian.
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