FORMOSA: Broadening the Base

In Formosa's last general elections three years ago, the candidate who carried off the top political job of mayor of the capital of Taipei was no Kuomintang (government) party stalwart, but a hard-campaigning islander named Kao Yu-shu. Nationalist leaders, painfully aware that many Formosans (Taiwanese) resented the political control of the Chinese mainlanders, were quick to get the point. Overruling the advice of old-line ward bosses (who wanted to gerrymander Taipei into an independent city and make its mayor a political appointee), Kuomintang reform politicians set out to defeat Independent Kao in the next election on his own terms.

Last week was election time on Formosa again. Candidates toured their constituencies in open cars, sound trucks blared, backs were slapped, babies kissed. Nearly all Kuomintang candidates were Taiwanese.* The new tactics paid off. In Taipei, where 82% of 376,870 voters cast their ballots in a hotly argued and cleanly fought campaign, the Kuomintang candidate, Formosa-born Huang Chi-jui, roundly trounced Independent Kao, despite the fact that Kao piled up 9,000 more votes than in 1954. Government party candidates, all native Taiwanese, took 46 of the Provincial Assembly's 66 seats, four of the island's five mayoralties and all 16 magistrate posts.

The Nationalist government's drive to broaden its base among the Taiwanese is also paying off in Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's 650,000-man military establishment—the only force in the free world engaged in a continuous, if sporadic, shooting war with Red China. Under Harvard-educated Defense Minister Yu Ta-wei, a mainlander, a U.S.-styled recruitment and training program has been set up which in less than a year has brought in enough young native Taiwanese soldiers to lower the average age in Chiang's army from 30 to 26.