China
Beijing's rants boost Taiwan referendum and Chen
By Laurence Eyton
atimes.com
TAIPEI - Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian has been accused of using the referendum he wants to hold in conjunction with the presidential election on March 20 to bolster his otherwise poor chances of re-election. Actually the referendum has been at least as much a hindrance to Chen's campaign as it has been a help.
And the China factor is a big one: too much anti-vote blustering and bludgeoning from Beijing could actually help the chances of the "defensive referendum" on whether the Taiwanese people want Chinese missiles pointed at their island - and it could boost the re-election of Chen, who is reviled in Beijing. For China, any referendum is a bad idea because it might give people unacceptable ideas about expressing their dissenting views, and it makes Taiwan's "yes" referendum vote on eventual reunification a pipe dream - unless Beijing is someday transformed beyond recognition.
First, after Chen's announcement at the end of November that he would hold a "defensive referendum", there were six weeks of rocky relations with the United States, including unprecedented criticism of Chen's referendum plans by US President George W Bush, which caused Chen's approval rating in Taiwan to fall.
The referendum law passed last November allows Taiwanese told hold referendums for the first time. President Chen is using a provision of the law to ask voters whether they want China to redirect about 500 missiles aimed at the island Beijing considers a renegade province. Chen estimates that 496 missiles are aimed at the island, and last autumn a Taiwanese official estimated at least 450 missiles, saying China was adding about 75 missiles every year in the coastal provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangxi and Zhejiang. Flight time: five to seven minutes.
The referendum will not ask voters on this island of 21.5 million people whether they wish to be independent of China.
Part of the problem - perhaps because it was making policy ad hoc and on the fly - was that Taiwan did a bad job of explaining what the referendum was about. China exploited these ambiguities in an unusually efficient disinformation campaign that had most of the world believing that Chen was about to breech the great taboo and hold a referendum on Taiwanese independence - that in itself is seen as running the risk of a war in the Taiwan Strait. This was never Chen's intention, but that is not how the situation was widely perceived.
Washington, of course, was better informed, but still showed anxiety over Chen's intentions. This may have been the result of a widely perceived incompatibility between Taiwan's representative to Washington, Chen Chien-jen, and the president's aims. Chen Chien-jen served as minister of foreign affairs under the previous Kuomintang (KMT) government - which at the time was vigorously opposed to the referendum principle - and is a ranking KMT member. Because he is not part of President Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) - of which the president is also the chairman - the foreign minister is seen in Taipei as being remote from the center of policy formulation and sharing the KMT's anti-referendum prejudices, making him at best an inarticulate spokesman for President Chen's ideas.
KMT urges officials to boycott referendum
The KMT is vigorously opposed to the president's holding of a referendum, as manifested most recently by a demand last weekend to all KMT-affiliated heads of local government to boycott the referendum vote by refusing to coordinate with the Central Election Commission to set up facilities for it to be carried out.
This is ironic since it is the KMT and its allied People First Party (PFP) - the two of which are widely referred to as the "pan-blue alliance" (blue after the color of the KMT emblem) - which pushed through the legislation that allowed the president to call the referendum.
The KMT-PFP support for referendum legislation was either political opportunism or a recognition of reality, depending on one's preference. While the right to initiate and hold referendums is supposedly guaranteed by Taiwan's constitution, until the middle of last year both parties were vigorously opposed to passage of organizing or enabling legislation, detailing how this new constitutional provision was to be carried out. The law specified who could initiate a referendum and how to do so, how the polling was to be organized and what kind of result, how high a vote, would be considered valid or binding.
The pan-blues have said they oppose the referendum because it could endanger national security by allowing a vote on Taiwanese independence that could lead to conflict with China. But after listening to this story for more than a decade, it became obvious this year, when President Chen started a push for referendum legislation, that the Taiwanese no longer believed that old argument. After four years of DPP government, they knew the pro-independence party was not going to seek a referendum on the topic, just as the pro-independence lobby knows that any referendum on declaring independence would be defeated.
Taiwanese are therefore no longer worried by what the DPP wild men might do, having found them to be not so wild. But the people are fed up with gridlock and rivalry between the DPP-controlled government and the KMT-PFP alliance-controlled legislature. The parties are unwilling to break the stalemate and the constitution makes no provisions for ending an impasse, so that needed political reforms and policy implementation have been reduced to a crawl. Referendums are seen as a way to break this logjam, while at the same time empowering the electorate at the expense of the widely despised political class.
Some Taiwanese also saw setting up a referendum mechanism as a way of safeguarding Taiwan from the kind of reunification that Beijing has always had in mind, to be effected by a cozy arrangement between the ruling parties on either side of the Taiwan Strait. The KMT's and PFP's dalliance with the Beijing authorities during their three years in the political wilderness has done much to reinforce this worry. Referendums were therefore seen as a safeguard that Taiwan would not be - to use an expression that has gained popularity in the past year - "sold out" by China's allies without consultation of the electorate.
This shift in public thinking resulted in broad public support for the referendum law, and the KMT-PFP alliance's opposition made the parties look like enemies of popular democracy and, given their mainland connections, fueled speculation about their motives. Last summer, therefore, the alliance did a 180-degree turnaround, said it would support referendum legislation, and started to push its own version of a referendum law through the legislature.
President exploits legal loophole
The law that was passed at the end of November was almost entirely a pan-blue creation and the alliance, by removing the executive's right to initiate a referendum, thought it had neutralized it in such a way as to prevent the DPP from using it to Chen's electoral advantage. The DPP's original intention had been to hold a vote on some popular issue along with the presidential election, thereby hoping to tie a "yes" vote on the referendum to a vote for the president. The version of the law the pan-blues eventually passed should have prevented this, in theory.
The DPP, however, had been able to insert one clause into the law that the pan-blues had let stand, and that Chen could exploit. This clause permitted a so-called "defensive referendum", allowing the president, on his own authority and without legislative oversight, to initiate a referendum on national-security issues if the island faced an external threat that could interfere with national sovereignty.
At the time the law passed, few even in the legislature itself understood the implications or purpose of the clause. "Imminent threat" was interpreted as something like a mobilization of mainland forces against Taiwan, the imposition of a naval blockade or a missile strike, and even DPP supporters thought they would have something better to do than worry about a referendum vote in such an eventuality.
Chen proved that the "defensive referendum" clause was not nearly as harmless as the pan-blues had thought, as he declared that Taiwan was under immediate threat from the 496 missiles China had aimed at the island. That being so, he claimed his right to initiate a referendum.
Since Chen was making policy as he went along, it is not surprising that his intentions were not clearly understood. The "defensive referendum" clause was widely understood to be about issues of sovereignty. Chen's determination to invoke it naturally gave the impression that he sought to have a referendum related to that topic. China, still reeling after its pan-blue Taiwanese allies passed the referendum law - which Beijing hated - was seething, while the United States was in a panic over what to do.
When Washington asked Taipei about Chen's intentions, it was told that two topics were being considered, either a vote rejecting "one country, two systems" as a basis for negotiation with Beijing, or a vote condemning China's buildup of missiles and demanding their removal. The Americans immediately told Taipei that a vote on "one country, two systems" was simply out of the question. Taipei settled on missiles as the referendum topic, and there followed a confusing six weeks of US sniping at Taiwan for no ostensible reason and a vast amount of speculation as to why this should be so.
At first the US position seemed reasonable. It opposed any move by either Taiwan or China aimed at unilaterally changing the status quo. Apart from that, if Taiwanese wanted to have referendums on their domestic affairs, they had every right to do so.
Bush's criticism causes anger, bewilderment
But almost immediately this attitude changed and gained a harder edge. On December 9, during a visit to the United States by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, US President George W Bush delivered an unprecedentedly harsh public criticism of Chen.
"The comments and actions made by the leader of Taiwan indicate that he may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo, which we oppose," Bush said, to Beings's satisfaction.
In Taipei, the reaction to Bush's reprimand was a mixture of puzzlement and anger. Chen had said the referendum would be about China's missiles, in effect public censure of China's military intimidation. To most observers this in no way could be seen as Taiwan's attempt to change the cross-Strait status quo in a way the United States would find objectionable, and so the US position needed explaining. "The US sees the defensive referendum as an attempt to change the cross-Strait status quo. Why? How? So far the Bush administration refuses to say," said one newspaper.
The most likely explanation, most Taipei commentators said, was that the US needed China's help to rein in North Korea's wayward nuclear program and, as a result, was obliged to give Beijing something important in return, a quid pro quo.
But there was also considerable anger over what was seen as US hypocrisy. Self-determination was a noble cause for the 13 colonies in 1776 and for Woodrow Wilson in 1918, and democracy has been a much-trumpeted core value of Bush's, but it was not, apparently, suitable for the Taiwanese, ran a popular argument.
According to Presidential Office insiders, however, most of this speculation missed the main point of US concerns. US assurances, made repeatedly throughout 2003, that Taiwan's security would not be compromised for Chinese cooperation on North Korea have not been broken. And, as a Presidential Office staffer told this reporter, as a matter of fact, "The US doesn't really care about the missile issue."
The focus of US worries, according to insiders, was not the topic of the referendum scheduled for March 20 but Chen Shui-bian's future intentions. Chen had, after all, first mooted passing a law to enable the holding of referendums as a way of being able to introduce a new constitution. The current constitution, drawn up for the government of all of China in 1947, is a contentious, anachronistic document in need of massive reform and amendment. But when most Taiwanese talk about constitutional change, they are not thinking about the separation of powers, the five-branch system of government and the exact relationship between the premier and the president.
Taiwan seeks separate identity
The latter half of 2003 saw massive demonstrations in Taiwan in favor of changing the official name of the political entity from the Republic of China, the name of the exiled Chiang Kai-shek regime, to the Republic of Taiwan. There are a number of secondary movements connected with this issue, such as seeking a change in the flag, its national anthem and other symbols. What is sought is the replacement of the China-related symbols of the old regime with distinct emblems of Taiwan.
The move for constitutional change, therefore, is not only about reforming the dysfunctional 1947 constitution but also is mixed up with the popular assertion of a Taiwanese-separatist identity and the jettisoning of symbolic links with mainland China. Some of this could be extremely inflammatory; a name change might be seen by China as a casus belli. It is this that really worries Washington, according to a source in the Presidential Office.
Last Friday Chen released the two questions for the referendum. They are:
If China refuses to withdraw the missiles it has targeted at Taiwan and to openly renounce the use of force against us, would you agree that the government should acquire more advanced anti-missile weapons to strengthen Taiwan's self-defense capabilities?
Would you agree that our government should engage in negotiations with China about the establishment of a "peace and stability" framework for cross-Strait interactions in order to build consensus and for the welfare of the peoples on both sides?
Officially the Taiwanese government is still awaiting the US response. In practice the Presidential Office makes no bones about the fact that it had the text of the questions approved by Washington before Chen announced them. It is tempting to speculate - and this is something that presidential sources will neither confirm or deny - that Taiwan has eased US worries by agreeing to run proposed future referendum topics past Washington for approval. For the time being, US worries seem to have been allayed.
Referendum faces problems
Chen now faces three problems: first, a referendum perceived as innocuous or even silly; second, a pan-blue boycott and obstruction by local polling officials; and third, a possible appeal to the island's highest court on whether a referendum is justified by a genuine threat to security.
While the first question is useful in that a "yes" answer would go some way toward preventing a hostile pro-China pan-blue legislature blocking or eviscerating the defense budget, the second question seems so vapid that a number of Taiwanese this reporter interviewed either cannot see the point of it or think that "talk if you can" is what the government is there for. Surely, they argue, the government hardly needs to ask whether it should do its job about promoting peace, stability, welfare and consensus.
There is a very real sense that the referendum is now so innocuous that this uproar has been a storm in teacup. Apathy toward the outcome might limit the referendum's downside for Chen, but it won't boost his appeal.
Another problem is the pan-blues' opposition to the proposed referendum taking place at all. Pan-blue local-government heads have been ordered not to cooperate with the Central Election Commission in setting up the infrastructure for the referendum. To what extent they can or will comply is anyone's guess. The government was quick to point out that proposed obstructive action is illegal - after all, it is part of local officials' jobs to administer polls - and officials who obey their parties' non-cooperation instructions might find themselves out of work and even in jail. Second, since the referendum piggybacks on the presidential election that they have an interest in facilitating, it is hard to see how arrangements can be made for one and not the other.
And finally, opponents could appeal the legality of the referendum to the Council of Grand Justices, Taiwan's interpreters of the constitution, for a decision on whether the missile threat constitutes the "imminent danger" that allows Chen to initiate the referendum in the first place.
It is possible, given the pan-blues' ineptitude in the election campaign, that an attempted boycott might backfire, especially since the alliance's zeal to stop the referendum echoes Beijing's position. Beijing's position is a difficult one and most Taiwanese seek a choice, not an echo.
China's intervention usually backfires
China's intervention in Taiwan affairs has the tendency, as seen in the presidential elections of both 1996 and 2000, to produce exactly the opposite result from that intended by Beijing. China appears to have hoped that by playing on US fears that Chen was stepping out of line on the independence issue, it could get Washington simply to stop the referendum in its tracks. As a result, it mounted a massive disinformation campaign in the United States, especially targeting members of Congress, to persuade Washington that Chen's plans were simply too dangerous.
Taiwan countered this with a certain amount of contrition - the agreement to let the Americans vet the proposed referendum questions, for example - and some plain speaking. Chen let Washington know that he was determined to hold the referendum, come what may. Last week, prior to getting Washington's approval on the questions, he said in two speeches, in effect, that holding the referendum meant far more to him than winning re-election, and if he had to choose a focus for his efforts up to March 20, it would be the referendum.
If US anxiety now seems allayed, China is left with a problem.
Now it is clear that the referendum is neither about sovereignty nor about any "hot button" issue that China can push in order to play on US fears. So Beijing is having to adopt the very course that has proved so self-defeating in the past: trying to influence a Taiwanese election by intimidation and bluster. It is also revealing that its opposition to the referendum was never connected with the independence issue, though it sought to delude others that this was its concern.
Beijing, in fact, is opposed to any referendum taking place about anything whatsoever. For two reasons.
First, it detests the example that a popular vote sets for other areas of China. Who knows? Hong Kong residents might demand a vote on the proposed security law under Article 23 of the region's Basic Law, which could limit and criminalize some kinds of dissent and free speech. China also finds the referendum odious because it underscores Beijing's frustrating impotence when it comes to influencing Taiwan's affairs.
Second, it knows that once Taiwanese have knitted the idea of referendums into their political culture, unification will become almost impossible. It will not happen without a Taiwanese popular vote in support of it. And this support will never be attained until the current Beijing regime has been reformed and transformed beyond recognition.
The more Beijing rants against the referendum and Chen, the more it is likely to persuade the Taiwanese that the referendum is a good idea, thereby helping Chen's campaign. The problem for Chen's domestic opponents is how to oppose the referendum without being seen by Taiwanese voters as unacceptably close to China.
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