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Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian's supporters celebrate his razor-thin victory

The Survivor
	Chen Shui-bian defied an assassination attempt, virulent opposition from Beijing and a desperately close vote to win re-election as President of Taiwan. But his problems may be just beginning
	By Anthony Spaeth

Posted Monday, March 22, 2004; 21:00 HKT
It was the type of whistle-stop Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian has experienced countless times in the past. On March 19, the final day of campaigning in a close and bitterly fought presidential election, loyalists lined a narrow street in the southern city of Tainan, near Chen's birthplace, brandishing the green flags of his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and shooting off celebratory fireworks. Chen and his running mate, Annette Lu, waved cheerfully from the back of an open-topped, cherry red campaign jeep emblazoned with a large numeral 1.

Suddenly, someone in the crowd, taking advantage of the noise and smoke, shot at the candidates. At least two rounds were fired from an unidentified weapon—possibly a homemade firearm. One penetrated the jeep's windshield. Chen didn't realize he had been hit and continued waving and calling to the crowd until blood started seeping through his gray windbreaker. His jeep screeched off to a hospital, where Chen declined a medical bed and walked to an isolated part of the emergency room. There, doctors applied 20 stitches and 12 sutures to a deep, 11-cm-long graze below Chen's navel. The President was impressively calm—his heart rate was a normal 84 beats per minute and blood pressure was 142/72 mm Hg. It was only a subsequent CAT scan that detected a bullet slug caught between his windbreaker and shirt. "If I hadn't turned my body around a bit," Chen told a doctor, "the bullet could have gone directly through me." (A bullet also grazed Vice President Lu's right knee.) Within six hours, the two were back in the capital, Taipei. Chen, who is known by the nickname "A-Bian," went on television to announce calmly, "A-Bian won't be knocked down by a bullet."

If you can consider a gunshot to the belly lucky, Chen seemed doubly fortunate in Tainan. His wound was minor, and the attack apparently clinched him the election by giving him a shot of sympathy, too. When the ballots were counted, the Chen-Lu tandem had squeaked in with only 50.1% of the vote—a margin of just 29,518 out of some 12.9 million votes tallied. Given the narrowness of Chen's victory, and the questions surrounding the attack on him—who was behind it and why—the rival electoral team of Lien Chan and James Soong challenged the result. "This election was unfair," Lien announced to thousands of cheering supporters as he refused to concede defeat. Many of his supporters had claimed that Chen staged the attack, and Lien raised his own doubts: "Until now we still haven't received a clear explanation of the shooting incident." He said he would petition the courts to invalidate the result and ask for a recount.

Choosing to ignore the controversy, Chen and Lu, who leaned heavily on a crutch, appeared before 10,000 jubilant supporters outside DPP election headquarters. "From now on," Chen said, "we must all embrace each other, creating a harmonious and unified new Taiwan." But six hours later, Lien and Soong led several thousand outraged loyalists to an indefinite sit-in outside the President's office.

The 2004 election has challenged the island's young democracy like no event before: first, with an attempted political assassination, then with a wafer-thin margin of victory, and now with protesters on the streets of Taipei. A recount, which seems likely, could take weeks and might trigger protracted legal wrangling. Even if the election result stands, the shared outrage of Chen's opponents could keep them together in opposition—rather than disintegrating in defeat—blocking initiatives that Chen may have planned in advance, especially toward China. Chen is under pressure from Taiwan's business community to establish some sort of working relationship with Beijing. He had hoped that a stronger mandate would allow him to engage Beijing on his own terms—indeed, in his victory speech, he asked China to "accept the democratic decision of the Taiwanese people." But that call by Chen immediately rang hollow not only with the mandarins across the Taiwan Strait but with roughly half his own people.

Hours after polling stations closed, China's leaders had yet to comment on Chen's re-election or Lien's challenge. China hates Chen, whom it considers a dangerous proponent of independence for what it regards as a renegade province. When he ran for the presidency four years ago, Beijing excoriated the former human-rights lawyer and ramped up its threats to invade Taiwan if unduly provoked. Sniping worked for Chen in that election campaign, too: Beijing's attacks helped him win a tight, three-person race. Since then, Chen has stoked up the pressure by insisting Taiwan is a sovereign nation and stressing the island's right to self-determination. (Two referendums Chen held on polling day last week were a similar jab: they asked voters whether Taiwan should boost its military preparedness if China does not renounce the right to use force against the island, and if Taipei should engage in talks with Beijing. In the end, less than half the electorate voted, rendering the referendums invalid, which Beijing did remark upon, gloatingly.) Chen's belief is that Taiwan must stand up for itself before the mainland gets overwhelmingly powerful on the world stage.

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