Mick Hartley

The choice offered to voters in tomorrow’s election in Taiwan could hardly be more clearcut: either move towards independence, with the threat of a Chinese retaliation up to and including invasion (with French assistance); or set up greater links with the mainland, leading irreversibly to some kind of reunification with the Chinese motherland. Oliver August in the Times gives an on-the-spot description of the energy of the election campaign:

Imagine the frenzy of Speakers’ Corner on a particularly busy Sunday afternoon. Now multipy that by 22 million — the population of Taiwan — and you have some idea of the level of election madness that has consumed this small island perched on the edge of China. Taiwan, fully democratic only since 1996, has one of the world’s most vibrant political cultures with the President drawing bigger crowds than any pop star. All the island’s highly politicised inhabitants seem to have participated raucously in the current campaign, an unlikely combination of television evangelism and a Rolling Stones tour. This evening alone, a quarter of the 16 million voters will attend election rallies. In recent weeks, dozens of television stations have been showing nothing but election talk shows where pundits assail each other without restraint. […]

If the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) wins, Taiwan will be subsumed into the behemoth mainland economy, a second Hong Kong. The direct transport links across the Taiwan Strait, which the KMT is proposing, would lead the island’s brightest minds and best businesses to decamp to the rising economic superpower. No future election would be able to reverse the gravitational pull of China. The plucky nation that defied Chinese threats of invasion for so long would eventually be beholden to Beijing and its economic helmsmanship, although cushioned by assured prosperity.

The other choice in the election, embodied by the incumbent President Chen Shuibian, is a push for independence from the mainland. The President has announced plans to revamp Taiwan’s Constitution by 2006 to cement its separateness in perpetuity. If elected for a final, legacy-making term, Mr Chen would be prepared to accept the possibility of a national security crisis to be the father of a fully autonomous Taiwan.

Beijing has vowed to attack the island if he formally proclaims sovereignty, a threat taken seriously in Washington, which is vouching for Taiwan’s security. But Mr Chen believes that he will have a rare window of opportunity in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The Chinese leadership, he calculates, is not prepared to risk international isolation or to wreck its cherished Games by sending an armada across the strait.

Perhaps Taiwan — aided by US military protection — can declare independence with impunity; or perhaps not. A miscalculation on this question has the potential to draw China and America into military conflict. Taiwan is rightly labelled a strategic accident waiting to happen. Yet, rejecting Mr Chen’s independence platform in favour of the KMT’s plan for unification by stealth hardly seems preferable. Either way, the Taiwanese would be destined to lose a measure of freedom.

Latest news is that Chen has been wounded in a shooting incident, though not seriously.

Correspondents say it is the first attack on a president in Taiwan and the incident has caused widespread shock and grief.

Crowds have been gathering at the headquarters of the president’s party in Taipei, many of them in tears, our correspondent says.

In the wake of the attack both the governing and opposition parties decided to suspend campaigning – but the government has already said that the election will go ahead as planned on Saturday.

Analysts have been saying that the election is too close to call, and our correspondent in Taiwan says that the shooting makes the result even more unpredictable.

Experts are saying that Mr Chen may now be propelled to a significant victory by a sudden wave of public sympathy.

The Times supplies more background with this article on Miss Taiwan (or, according to the China, Miss Chinese Taipei):

About 70 per cent of the island’s population is native Taiwanese, while the rest are Han Chinese whose families arrived from the mainland after the Kuomintang (KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek lost a civil war against Mao’s Communists in 1949.

For five decades, the KMT imposed a Chinese mindset on Taiwan in preparation for its eventual return to the mainland. Four years ago, long after it became obvious that Communist rule had became permanent, the KMT lost power to President Chen’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has its roots in the predominantly native Taiwanese south of the island.

President Chen, a native Taiwanese, set out to create a local identity. The word “Taiwan” was added to passports next to Taiwan’s official name, Republic of China, and new maps were issued that showed the mainland as a separate country.

Most importantly, President Chen lifted the KMT ban on speaking Taiwanese in schools and instead made language lessons in the island’s native tongue mandatory in primary schools.