Seeking a Fresh Mandate

Taiwan's President Chen Shui-Bian is a politician who is not afraid to pick a fight, even with China. But last week, at a rally in Taoyuan county for this Saturday's legislative election, Chen was playing peacemaker. Dressed down in a blue shirt open at the collar and a beige vest splashed with party slogans in green Chinese characters, Chen asked the throng of several thousand to give his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) the majority in the legislature that it currently lacks. If he gets it, pledged Chen, he would push to resume talks with Beijing. "I'd like to end the hostility between China and Taiwan," he said, stretching out both arms and giving the crowd two thumbs up.

Chen hopes he gets two thumbs up, too. Taiwan's 16 million voters fall broadly into two categories: those who see Taiwan's future as going it alone—the DPP's chief constituency—and those who don't want to provoke China by promoting independence for Taiwan—the traditional base for the DPP's archrival, the Kuomintang (KMT). But if Taoyuan voter Chou Hui-mei, a 45-year-old furniture importer, is anything to go by, Chen's strategy is having some success bridging that ideological gap. Chou's parents were mainlanders who fled to the island along with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists in 1949, and she herself was once a member of the KMT. But she's switching sides, she says, because she agrees with the DPP's policy of putting Taiwan first. "I was born in Taoyuan and identify myself as Taiwanese," she says. "I'm not worried about China's military threats. If Taiwan is united, we won't have to fear foreign aggression."

Elections for Taiwan's 225-member legislature used to pivot on localized concerns, like whether a county had enough roads. But this Saturday's ballot is proving to be a referendum on the big issues: Taiwan's relationship with China, and Chen's presidency. His narrow re-election in March—just one day after an apparent assassination attempt—left him without a clear mandate and spawned weeks of street protests by the KMT-led opposition. That stretched into acrimonious months of ballot recounts and lawsuits challenging both the vote tally and the circumstances of the shooting incident. Though the courts have upheld Chen's winning margin, KMT chairman Lien Chan, who ran against Chen, has yet to concede defeat, and the KMT and its allies have used their current slim majority in the legislature to block everything from buying U.S. arms to changing history books.

As a result, Taiwan today is not unlike the U.S. before its presidential election last month: divided into two main camps, labeled not red (for the Republicans) and blue (for the Democrats) but green and blue, battling for Taiwan's soul. The green group, comprising the DPP and the Taiwan Solidarity Union, sees the island as an independent entity, if not in name then at least in substance. "The green will win a majority [in the legislature] because of the rise of Taiwan nationalism," predicts Luo Wen-chia, a Cabinet minister and longtime Chen aide. "It's a decision of values—Taiwan values." For the KMT, which leads the blue side, this week's ballot is a battle for survival. "If we don't keep the majority, there's nothing left," says Liao Feng-te, head of organization and development for the KMT. "We can go out on the street and throw rocks—that's about it." Given the growing sense of Taiwan identity, the KMT is downplaying eventual reunification with the mainland, once an uncompromising part of its ideology. But without a clear message to send voters, the party is in a state of confusion. "I think we don't really know what to do," says Jason Hu, mayor of the city of Taichung in central Taiwan and one of the KMT's top leaders. If green wins, says Hu, "Chen will have a supreme power machine."

A DPP victory in the legislative election would give Chen a new mandate to push through two pet initiatives: buying an $18 billion arms package from the U.S., and holding an island-wide referendum on changing the constitution, which was promulgated on the mainland in 1947, to make it more relevant to today's Taiwan. (China considers both moves hostile.) At the same time, Chen has in recent weeks repeatedly pledged that he won't declare independence or have it written into a new constitution. That's not just campaign rhetoric. Though it is Taipei's main backer, Washington is currently enjoying excellent relations with Beijing and has made it plain to Chen that it will not tolerate any change in the status quo between Taiwan and China. Chen is "mobilizing his electoral base by appealing to fundamentalists," says Emile Sheng, associate professor of political science at Taipei's Soochow University, yet also "speaking to the Americans."

Performing that balancing act isn't easy, and it will be more difficult if the DPP does not win the legislative election. Many pollsters believe that though the blue alliance might lose some seats, it may not be enough for a green majority—in which case the DPP will be forced to horse-trade with independent legislators to carry out its agenda. However, at the Taoyuan rally, for 53-year-old steelworker Fan Cheng-hung the bigger worry is that the loser will be Taiwan. "We deserve a country," he says, "not the aggression of the world's superpowers."