Tuesday Not-so Short Shorts

Went cycling in the succulent hills in northern Miaoli/southern Hsinchu this weekend. Got lost a lot...

Frozen Garlic has a great write up of the KMT Chairman election. He observes of Wu Den-yih's attempt to return to the KMT center....

My guess is that Wu will be fairly successful at holding the broader KMT coalition together. I don’t expect a spate of new splinter parties from the blue side, at least not in the next year and a half. However, I think Wu is overestimating the number of voters who are waiting to be pulled back into the KMT coalition. In 2012, 54% voted for Ma or Soong. In 2016, only 44% voted for Chu or Soong. Wu might consolidate that vote, but his plan to return to the good old days of 2011 doesn’t seem to me to hold much promise of expanding it much. Wu Den-yi is betting otherwise. I guess we’ll see.

I think he is right about the voters. Note that the DPP's attack on the KMT is two-pronged. First, it is going after the assets the Party looted from the people of Taiwan. Second, with the huge infrastructure program it is going after the local factions who are fed and watered by KMT patronage networks fueled by central government development funds. The KMT's real power depends on its connections to the Taiwanese factions in the hinterland. Wu might give them hope...

....but these connections were wrecked by Ma. Solidarity.tw wrote two years ago...

In the 1980s and 90s, Presidents Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) and especially Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) sought to “Taiwanize” the KMT by giving power to members of other ethnic groups, but President Ma has reversed that current. Four of his five premiers have been waishengren. The current one, Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國), was born in Fenghua County, Zhejiang Province, just like Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo. One can guess from his first name (治國, literally “govern the nation”) that his parents somehow had plans for him to someday hold the post he does now. What goes for the premier also goes for the ministers. Eight of the past nine winners of the Executive Yuan’s National Cultural Award were born in mainland China. And Ma is thought to have led the campaign to block Wang’s presidential nomination.

Ma's government and governance were both focused on a tiny class of elite mainlanders and academics. Throughout his presidency there was constant grumbling from the Taiwanese KMT, who must have been very happy with Wu Den-yih's election as chair.

The interesting moment will come when the 2020 presidential candidate is chosen. Wu has made no secret of his desire to be the candidate. He will be 72 in 2020 (b.1948) and he is Taiwanese. The old mainlander rank and file have made it clear they will never put up with a non-mainlander presidential candidate. For them this is one advantage of Honhai/Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou (Guo Tai-ming) -- he is a mainlander whose father was a police officer -- and thus acceptable to that deep blue base as a presidential candidate for the Party.

2018 also looms. I expect the KMT to recover some ground in the legislature. That will reflect well on Wu and further encourage him to toss his hat into the 2020 ring. D'oh: no legislative election in 2018 despite the fact that I keep thinking there is. Still living in 2005.... I expect the KMT to recover some ground in that election....

The struggle over the infrastructure bill is terrifying the KMT. Some criticisms from the anti-Taiwan party are in this Taipei Times article. Note the complaint about building parks -- the KMTer insists it should be spent on Big Infrastructure which will enable the government to hand down cash to its patronage networks for public construction. The Tsai plan isn't like that, which is worrying the KMT no end.

The asset struggle continues, as the DPP accuses the KMT of submitting "ghost documents" to support its claim to ownership of certain land. Forged land titles and fake contracts were hardly abnormal during the authoritarian period...

Meanwhile, back in the KMT authoritarian days of straight Confucian families, certain Taiwanese parents are desperately struggling to keep their gay children straight on the surface and suicidal in their hearts. Retrograde alliances demand that references to the complexity of human sexuality be removed from textbooks, in case children discover that it is normal to be complex and different. At a local high school a campaign of threats and harassment forced the school to remove a rainbow flag from the graduation ceremony memorabilia. If only these people put such energy into making the world a better place...

On a side note, the constant use of "terror" as a descriptor -- in this case, the "rainbow terror" of ZOMG gayness -- tends to cheapen and debase the meaning of that word, which I expect is one reason that anti-democracy groups constantly use it.

Cleaning up the damage from KMT rule is going to take two generations...

Across the Pacific, the Canadian government decided to permit the sale of a key tech/defense firm, Norsat, to a Chinese company. Norsat does business with both the US and Taiwan. The stupidity of this is mind-blowing. Lots of criticism inbound, so perhaps the Canadian government will reconsider betraying two democracies and its own tech sector for better relations with a government that despises Canada and wants to steal its technology.
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Daily Links:

• Three Taiwanese-Canadians elected to office in Canada
• MAC poll says one China precondition rejected by Taiwanese
• US lists Lee Ming-che as political prisoner, first step in getting US involved.
• Caucus on Hong Kong democracy formed in Taiwan legislature, increasing links between Hong Kong and Taiwan democracy movements.
• Keith Menconi in the News Lens on the people behind the new social movements
• TT on the new Southbound policy, which keeps looking better and better.
• AmCham on the defense manufacturing in Taiwan
• Taiwan suffers a great loss: Award winning filmmaker Chi Po-lin killed in helicopter crash. His Beyond Beauty film is online here.
• The new committee on indigenous people and transitional justice took another step forward with a website launch this week.

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