Kuomintang’s China-friendly president of Taiwan is re-elected
Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou and his wife Christine Chow Mei-ching celebrate
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
The rain that swept the city streets, blurring lights and muffling the blare of klaxons, perhaps helped to dampen passions. Outside the Kuomintang’s Taipei headquarters, the victors smiled under thin plastic hoods, cheering in relief as much as in celebration. Across town, the defeated opposition’s supporters seemed subdued.
Taiwanese politics are vibrant, emotional, sometimes dirty and occasionally violent. Some might have expected stronger reactions after a race too close to call culminated in yesterday’s re-election of incumbent Ma Ying-jeou, who has overseen an unprecedented rapprochement with China.
But the muted response to his victory – he took 51.6% of the vote to challenger Tsai Ing-wen’s 45.6% – echoed an unusually calm campaign. Some observers think this youthful democracy’s fifth presidential election offers hope that its politics are evolving from what one voter described as “two parties shouting at each other”…
The result was a relief for Beijing, displeased by the re-emergence of the pro-independence DPP, despite Tsai’s care in moderating the party’s rhetoric. The election was watched closely in Washington, amid fears of potential instability…
Somehow separate from Washington’s recent warhawk agitprop about the region – I guess.
One DPP activist sought to put the contest into a broader perspective. “If we win or lose – to me, even getting here today is a remarkable achievement,” said Chiu Chui-chen, hours before polls opened. Chiu, 61, spent five years in prison during the 1980s due to his pro-democracy activities. Back then, he had struggled to imagine voting. That Taiwan did not see presidential elections until 1996, and elected its first non-Kuomintang leader four years later, helps explain why politics is a passion here.
The closing rallies on Friday night epitomised the carnival spirit, with tens of thousands packing each venue. Their roars of approval rivalled the volume of bullhorns and vuvuzelas as they waved flags and cheered their candidates on. Outside the Bancai sports stadium, where Tsai held her final event, vendors did a brisk trade in T-shirts, dolls and other campaign paraphenalia.
Hours later, voters clambered onto buses and trains, travelling hours across the island to reach their registered polling station. Around 200,000 returned from overseas to cast their vote…
Most of my readers weren’t alive when common practice for whichever clowns owned Washington DC was to proclaim a need to “set Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang loose on mainland China” in grand Cold War sabre rattling. A hilarious picture to anyone who followed his helter-skelter retreat from the mainland in 1949.
If I wasn’t consumed with my studies of Deng Xiaoping and how he initiated the transformation of China into one of the strongest economies in the world – how he managed to go from internal exile and house arrest to succeed Mao – I would be spending some time on the parallel transformation of the Kuomintang. Most of Chiang Kai-shek’s reign allowed elections for no office higher than mayor. Until 1996. Over twenty years after his death.
That his party has become the bastion of rapprochement with mainland China is – if nothing else – the leading tale of commerce and communications in modern Asia. I spent most of my longest career [of several] involved in a small way with exporting and importing between the United States and Asia. Trudging through the transition of business of several firms from Japan to Taiwan and eventually to China. But, fascination with the topic doesn’t justify wending my way off-topic. 
Suffice it to say that several political parties completely understanding that the mutual benefit of commerce brings more significant and positive change to peoples’ lives than bitterness and ideological conflict.
