It’s certainly been a pleasure watching the presidential campaign launch of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Hou You-yi (侯友宜) lurch painfully about like a wounded pachyderm in search of an elephant graveyard. Hou’s fall to third place in some polls last week appears early, and it might still be recoverable. But grumbling in his party about replacing him has already begun. Indeed, all indications are that the party that twice gave us Lien Chan (連戰), the most despised politician in Taiwan, as a presidential candidate and later offered voters Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) and Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), is arcing along its normal descending trajectory, the North Korean missile test of electoral politics. A KIND OF POLICY PLATFORM Last week the KMT doubled down on this path with Hou’s calls for nuclear power and more death penalty executions, standard KMT fare for decades (the latter is unnecessary since so many potential criminals are likely to die in traffic accidents long before they harm anyone). Apparently KMT policy institutions are not echo chambers so much as mausoleums where dead ideas are embalmed and then periodically put on display. The lack of public policy imagination is obvious. A less obvious facet of KMT ineptitude: with years of speculation that Hou would be their man in 2024, neither Hou nor the party insisted on interesting or experimental public policies to showcase Hou’s greatness in preparation for the showdown. Of course, that is even more true of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Hou’s slide and the media buzz surrounding it are obscuring the truly urgent problem the pro-Taiwan side faces: DPP presidential candidate William Lai (賴清德) has not expanded his voter support beyond the party base. In most polls he remains below 40 percent. Independent voters are staying away in droves, and for the moment the young are turning to
A fine-grained opinion piece in United Daily News (UDN) in December was packed with data that tells the story of the coming voter shifts in this election. The piece cited another UDN poll from early last year that surveyed residents of the six municipalities. The overall data identified four areas of major concern: housing prices (named by 50.6 percent), low salaries and insufficient career opportunities (32.2 percent), transportation problems (26.5 percent) and air pollution (25.1 percent). The next more important issue was public order at 10.1 percent. None of these issues have become a signature issue for any of the presidential candidates. As several commentators have noted, the public’s overwhelming concern with domestic issues may at last compel a national election in which domestic issues play a strong role. Much depends, of course, on whether the People’s Republic of China (PRC) engages in its usual self-defeating aggression around elections. AIR POLLUTION AND TRANSPORTATION The air pollution issue is bound up with the transportation issue. Studies in several countries show that air pollution increases both the rate and severity of traffic accidents. A Taiwan-based study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in June last year found that “unhealthy AQIs were associated with an increased risk of sustaining severe [road traffic injuries (RTI)]. In addition, the patients involved in [road traffic accidents] that occurred in periods with higher hourly PM2.5 concentrations were more likely to sustain severe RTIs.” Bad air kills, not only by obscuring road conditions but also by reducing cognitive functions: it causes impulsive behavior, irritability and aggression. The above study observes that of the 474,000 document road traffic injuries and nearly 3,000 deaths in 2021, 75 percent involved motorcycles. These vehicles, dangerous and polluting though they may be, remain popular because they are a convenient response to terrible
One of the ways that pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) peaceniks forward PRC propaganda is by presenting its fabricated history of the Taiwan-China relationship as accepted, mainstream history. Like the faces of astronauts on rocket sleds reshaped by high GEE effects, every conversation about Taiwan is distorted by this stream of effluent. PRC supporters ground their conversations about the PRC in this fake history because it allows them to maintain that the PRC is “reasonable” and is simply deterring Taiwan’s “permanent separation” from “China” rather than bent on annexing an island it has never ruled over. It also recasts the PRC as the victim of history, presenting it as a nation maimed by history. That idea of victimhood is overt in the PRC’s expansionist claim of “century of humiliation,” but it is latent in every claim that Taiwan is part of China. Writers who speak of “Beijing’s feelings” or “China’s perspective” on Taiwan as part of China forward this propaganda. Seldom does serious commentary forthrightly start with the plain fact that Beijing is perfectly aware that it is engaging in annexing an island that does not and never has belonged to it, and whose people do not want to be annexed. In fact, the word “annex,” which until recently never appeared in the media to describe Beijing’s desire to absorb Taiwan, has in recent months been creeping into articles here and there. Progress is slow, but steady. Will the PRC attack Taiwan? Many people think that chances are high, yet those of us who have been sounding the alarm are told we are too emotional, or discussions are raising tensions, or even that in warning about it we are increasing the chance of an invasion. What can history teach us? Let us recall Tibet. In both Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Chinese Communist
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) nomination electioneering swung into full force last week, with New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) peppered with questions from reporters and opposition legislators, and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co founder Terry Gou (郭台銘) staging press conferences and a rally in Kaohsiung. Of course, there is no primary in the KMT this year, as KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) said on March 22 that the party will do the choosing. Both Hou and Gou attacked the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) COVID-19 and vaccine policies. Western Kentucky University political scientist Timothy Rich wrote on Twitter that his survey data shows that KMT and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) support for DPP COVID measures “collapsed” between March and September of 2021. Thus, these attacks are aimed at shoring up support among the KMT base. They are likely also aimed at the working-class informal sector, which some commentators have argued turned on the DPP in the last year’s local elections because of the damage its businesses suffered from the nation’s COVID policies. THE POLICIES OF HOU AND GOU Hou seems to be following the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) playbook of maintaining that the Republic of China (ROC) is the only China and his home, while making mainstream noises such as rejecting one country, two systems, and saying that Taiwan’s fate must be left up to its 23 million people. Ma became the only anti-independence politician ever elected president by following that prescription. Surprisingly for a non-politician, Gou has been the only candidate to offer something akin to policy proposals. Some of them are comical, such as his idea of building an army of 80,000 robots to defend Taiwan. Some are intriguing, including his proposal to build small modular nuclear reactors in every region. And some are plain disturbing, such as his
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