Asia Centre

Voters in the two autonomous municipalities of Kaohsiung and Taipei elected their mayors and and town councillors in an election held on December 9 2006. In Taipei, Hau Long-bin, the designated successor of the previous mayor, Ma Ying-jeou, was elected with 53.81% of the vote, while his opponent, former Prime Minister Hsieh Chang-ting, the candidate of the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), received 40.89% of the vote. In Kaohsiung, Chen Chu, former Minister of Labour in the Su Tseng-chang government, managed to keep the city in the fold of PDP with a majority of 1,114 votes (49.91%) over her Kuomintang opponent, Huang Chun-ying, (49.27%) who had already lost in 2002.

These are surprising results if one takes into account the dismal political standing in which the PDP found itself during 2006^[1]. According to Wu Yu-shan the results reflect the weight of structural political factors on the behaviour of voters in the two main municipalities in the north and south of Taiwan: a dividing line which marks the existence of different political dynamics in the North and the South, which the author dubs "one coast, two countries"^[2]. The Liberty Times, a daily whose allegiance is to independence, sees the PDP's good results as revealing the desire of Taiwanese voters to protect a Taiwanese national identity.

According to Wu Yu-shan, these municipal elections were a direct continuation of the previous election, which took place in December 2005, and which had witnessed a comfortable victory for the Kuomintang^[3] : the presidential majority and the PDP were caught up in corruption scandals implicating close allies of President Chen Shui-bian, the popular movement led by Shih Ming-teh against the President had met with  major success, and the corruption scandal in connection with the Kaohsiung metro made possible Kuomintang hopes of victory in both North and South. As the editorial in the Liberty Times notes, the Parliamentary opposition was facing the election in a highly favourable political context. However Wu Yu-shan notes with interest that identical political information produced diametrically opposed reactions in the North and in the South. As he sees it, to voters in the North, the scandals about corruption in the presidency of the Republic deprived the government and the PDP of all credit, while to voters in the South, it was the repeated attacks of a partisan press against the family and the person of the President of the Republic which were perceived as intolerable, which is the point of view taken by the Liberty Times. Thus the affair of the illegal use of special municipality of Taipei funds in which, just before the election, the incumbent mayor of Taipei, Ma Ying-jeou was implicated, was deemed in the North not be comparable with the alleged actions of Chen Shui-bian, and in the South to be further justification for voting in support of the presidential majority.

Wu Yu-shan dismisses an explanation based on the individual behaviour of the candidates. He notes that Hau Long-bin had just joined the Kuomintang, had held a ministerial post in a presidential majority government and had to face the independent candidacy of Soong Chuyu, while Hsieh Chang-ting, one of the bosses of the PDP, could exploit his considerable experience of election campaigns to play on the split in the Kuomintang vote. To voters in the South, Chen Chu was mired in faction fighting and did not have the complete support of former mayor Hsieh Chang-ting^[4], while Huang Chun-ying, the Kuomintang candidate, was in a strong position since the previous municipal election which he had lost to Hsieh Chang-ting by three percentage points.

Wu Yu-shan considers, on the contrary, that it is the influence of a dividing line between North and South which explains the results of this election. He sees it as a manifestation of the fundamental structure of the Taiwanese political landscape.

First he provides a historical analysis of local elections in Taiwan to emphasise the permanency of an entrenched vote for the PDP in the South. In 1997, during the major defeat of the Kuomintang, the North and the South had gone over to the PDP, while the Kuomintang had only managed to hold on to the Centre and the East.  Four years later, the North went back to the Kuomintang but the Centre and the South remained in the hands of the Greens. Another four years on, the PDP lost the North and the Centre again, but kept the South of the island. Wu Yu-shan concludes that there is permanent support for the PDP in the South, while putting forward the argument that the North is liable to shift, depending on the ideological postions taken by the Kuomintang. This is a situation which Wu Yu-shan refuses to describe as "Green South, Blue North" and which he analyses, on the contrary, as the product of a collective unconscious (zhongshu quxiang) built around attachment to the values of "Taiwaneseness" (benturentong) and around a certain mistrust of the Kuomintang, against which the individual behaviour of the candidates has only a limited influence. According to Wu Yu-shan, this factor, which he deems to be structural, will continue to influence future elections in a direction which will not necessarily be favourable to the Kuomintang.

Wu Yu-shan then sharpens his analysis with a description of how the political parties exploit these structural rigidities. He considers the relationship between electoral support and government performance in order to explain why the PDP has a pool of captive votes and why the disintegration of this relationship only underlines the political power of support for Taiwanese independence, with a certain limitation, however: the danger of estrangement from voters in the centre. For the Kuomintang, the electoral role of its ideology has declined, and the party can only rely on its performance to attract votes, a situation which presents a number of difficulties since performance is difficult to control, and the way in which it is judged by the voters is not fixed. It is for this reason that political pressure on Kuomintang candidates is stronger.

The editorial in the Liberty Times places its analysis of the results of the election in exactly the same the framework as that made by Wu Yu-shan. According to the latter, Taiwanese voters in the South wished to protect the values of a Taiwanese identity by voting for the PDP in the face of the mistrust (bu fang xin) aroused by the Kuomintang and its positions deemed to be too close to China, and this despite the opposition's attempt to capitalise on the PDP's failure in government. This is a point of view which clearly confirms the accuracy of Wu Yu-shan's structural analysis, according to which the 2006 municipal elections only confirmed a situation which already existed.