In Taiwan right now.

There is a very good article about how US policy toward Taiwan has gotten seriously misinterpreted....

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/EL11Ad02.html

Something to keep in mind is that subtle messages don't make the news in Taiwan. There is a huge amount of background noise from the news, and you have to scream to be heard. Fortunately, there are a lot of people who are seeing the danger of war, and are trying to stop things from getting out of hand.

Here is a clueless article from the Washington Post that totally misinterprets Chen's motives....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51214-2003Dec9.html

Something to keep in mind here is that Chen started talking about independence and referendums not because he is locked in a reelection battle. He started talking about independence and referendums because he wants to make Taiwan an independent state, and he has never been shy about admitting that. He's been reined in by public opinion, and any sign of support by Washington could give people in Taiwan the mistaken impression that Washington is wants a war over Taiwan and start things down the road to disaster. The other thing to point out is that Chen didn't start off by proposing a missile referendum. When he first broached the idea of referendum two weeks ago, he didn't say at all what he wanted to do. It's only after Washington objected that he toned down his objectives.

He now says that he wants a referendum to preserve the status quo. If anyone can figure out this logic, let me know.

Here is another clueless article from the folks that brought you the war in Iraq.....

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/475fvwvf.asp

Note that they also conveniently didn't notice that when Chen first opened his mouth, he didn't talk about a referendum only on missiles. Also, they don't seem to note the dozen of other actions that Chen has taken over the last few months.

Another good article....

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/international/asia/28CND-TAIW.html?hp

and to balance that, a rather clueless editorial in the Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17577-2003Nov27.html

The editorial is rather clueless, and manages to both misread Beijing and Taipei. The misreading seems to be in some implied "either-or" which don't apply.

* Either Beijing are nice pragmatic leaders or their are old stupid communists. In actuality, the goals of Chinese foreign and domestic policy has not changed in over 150 years. The only thing that has changed is that Beijing is getting more intelligent at pursuing its goals.

* Another assumption is that Beijing doesn't understand Taiwan electorial politics. This comes from the the deep belief that democracy is self-evidential good, and therefore the only reason someone would have for opposing democracy is that they don't understand it. In actuality, Beijing has shown a very strong understanding of Taiwanese electoral politics.

* This is curious since is seems obvious that the People's Daily understands the politics of the referendum more so that the editorial writers of the Washington Post. The referendum law passed yesterday is not particularly objectionable to Beijing, it was the other drafts that didn't pass. Also Beijing's statements have been very careful to avoid a backlash (most notably by not telling people not to vote for Chen). Also, the statement that Beijing's rhetoric spurred the parliament into passing the referendum law is just wrong. The timelines don't mesh.

* There's also a very curious implication that Chen isn't serious when he wants independence and is saying things just for electoral purposes. It doesn't seem to occur to the Washington Post that both might be true.

* Finally, there seems to be a belief that you can only divide tactics into carrots and sticks. In reality, an effective policy requires both carrots and sticks. Also what an effective policy requires most of all is good intelligence. The problem with the editorial writers of the Washington Post is that they are in Washington and they don't spend time day in and day out tracking the Taiwan situation. Hence they can only look at very coarse options (either carrot or stick and not a fine grained combination of both.)

The reason the New York Times article is interesting is that it basically says that the Washington Post article is wrong, and that Beijing did manage to move things in its way without triggering a backlash.

The last citation was actually from the associated press. This is was written by the Washington Post and gives a much more accurate version of what is going on.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17088-2003Nov27.html

2003 November 27

It's actually gotten a whole lot less depressing. Lien-Soong are ahead by 10 points. The Western press has finally noticed that there has been shouting across the Taiwan Straits, but I think they are misinterpreting what is going on.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16617-2003Nov26.html

The Taiwan Office in Beijing issued a threat of "strong action" if Taiwan passes a referendum law "without limits." It's a common tactic that when things are near a deadline that Beijing will issue a harsh sounding threat in order to get the last few concessions. These threats usually make Beijing sound crazy, but that is part of the tactics. You can't make a credible threat if you look too rational.

What I think Beijing was trying to do was to prevent some of the more extreme drafts of the referendum law to pass, and that is what happened. Even though the referendum law doesn't explicitly prevent a referendum on unification, it does have limits on on constitutional issues.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/11/27/taiwan.vote/index.html

Of course may be Beijing is crazy, and will start firing missiles. I doubt it though.

There are some interesting things here.

* It now seems to me that Chen has neither the ability or the will to provoke Beijing too much. During the referendum discussion, he could have really riled Beijing by strongly supporting the drafts that had unlimited topics.

* The other really interesting thing that Beijing said at that news conference that he had no opinion on who should be Taiwan's next president. Of course it would have been highly stupid for Beijing to express an opinion, but the fact that it didn't suggests that it is not irrational. I think that Beijing recognizes (correctly) that it has very limited options in determining the next president in Taiwan, and is focusing now on setting limits should Chen Shui-Bian get elected.

* The question of whether Beijing is rational or not is important, but a rational Beijing should be able to see how much what happened is in Beijing's interests. Passing the referendum bill removes this issue from the Presidential election, and greatly increases the changes the Blues will win.

It turns out that there was a big meeting in Beijing. Beijing has been loudly making its point that independence means war the past few days. This has made a lot of news in the United States, but most of the papers in Taiwan are more interested in the constitutional debate the Lien Chan is going to have with Chen Shuibian.

It also appears that the United States has given Beijing what it wanted which was a statement that the United States opposes any unilateral change to the status quo.

Assuming that Beijing isn't stupid, we should see a racheting down of the rhetoric. It's made its point and pressing the point too much will start being counterproductive.

I think that Beijing's reaction was a bit of a surprise to Chen Shuibian and at least some of the people within the DPP, who assumed that Beijing would be too distracted to be willing to go to war. It's interesting that Chen's reaction has been rather low key. The problem is that Chen now has to convince moderate voters to vote for him, and an overreaction on his part could lose him votes. One thing that is significant is that the screaming back and forth is being done by mid-level spokesman and officials. This is usually a good sign, because it means that both sides realize the seriousness of what is going on, leaving the leaders the flexiblity to step in if things look like they are getting out of hand.

I think in the long run, this is probably going to hurt Chen a bit, because it seems to kill his argument that Beijing will just accept him if he gets elected.

Speaking of which, Lien seems to have stopped the bleeding, and is back to six to ten points ahead. The main thing that the KMT did (which was brilliant) was to let the referendum bill pass and to proposal immediate constitutional amendments and to challenge the DPP to describe its constitutional amendments. This puts the DPP on the defensive, because frankly, I don't think that the DPP has given much thought as to how exactly to amend the constitution. The thing about the DPP's proposals for a new constitution is that there are all sorts of face saving ways to do that and not get Beijing angry. What was scary from Beijings point of view was that Chen was closing off these face saving means perhaps calculating that American support was greater than it actually is.

But there are still four months. Things can change radically from week to week. The thing to watch for this week is 1) the poll numbers 2) Chen's reaction to all of this and 3) whether the PRC has enough discipline to cease firing once it seems to have made its point.

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/11/10/willy.column/index.html

Interesting article. Now if Wen Jiabao says what everyone expects him to say, then the election is over and Chen wins. But given that fortune has been unexpectedly good to Chen, one may hope at least that Wen will give us a surprise and say something that actually isn't massively self-destructive. Then again maybe not.

It's now pretty clear what is going on. Chen and Lien are neck and neck. The DPP was right, and my analysis of the polls the last several months have been wrong.

TVBS shows Lien only ahead by three points. So it looks like a real horse race. It's not quite the way that I wanted the election to turn out, but at least there are still four months, and if Lien can lose a 20 point lead in two months, then he still might be able to regain a 1 point lead on 3/20.

The things that really hurt Lien in the two or three weeks are Chen's trip to the United States, and some very nasty personal attacks against Soong. The point of the attacks was to (successfully) weaken the personal popularity that Soong has in Central Taiwan. The DPP has stopped attacking Soong personally, but of course it's always easy to call off an attack after it has succeeded. Chen Shuibian has actually become a rather smooth political operator, launching those attacks and then sitting back behind the scenes.

The latest controversy is that Soong has been criticized for kneeling in front of a Yulin commissioner. It's still unclear what effect (positive or negative) that will have on the polls. Something to keep in mind is that polls are lagging indicators. For example the TVBS polls last week didn't factor in Chen's trip to the United States.

The battleground appears to be central Taiwan, and at least the KMT-PFP has now seemed to abandoned its passive strategy. However, whether or not the KMT-PFP new strategy of campaign rallies and personal appearances will have an impact remains to be seen. The KMT-PFP is being far more specific in its economy policies, but they still seem to lack a certain coherence that the DPP has.

So what are the implications of Chen wins? My guess is that the PRC won't overreact. The problem (at least from my point of view) is that a Chen victory will simply continue the drift toward independence that Taiwan has been undertaking, while a Lien victory would stop that drift. However, it's really far too early to speculate on what happens if Chen wins (or for that matter if Lien wins). A lot will depend on the particular circumstances of the victory (i.e. what is the margin, what are the issues, what happens in future legislative elections).

The election has, however, gotten to be a nail-biter, and it's going to be a tumultous four months. I'll try to keep this page up to date, but sometimes it's just going to be too stressful for me. I'm probably not going to comment on the polls or the election for the next few weeks, because the polls and the news are likely to be extremely depressing (for me at least, you can probably find a DPP supporter that is just loving it). Even if the KMT-PFP pulls out of its nosedive (and who knows if this is going to be the case?), it's going to be several weeks before it has any impact, and in the meantime the polls will all likely show Chen pulling ahead. It will be several weeks before there is any possibility that there will be good news, and it's always possible that the news a month from now will be more depressing than it is today (Chen ahead by 20 points on a platform of total independence).

The one piece of good news is that at least there are still four months in the election, the KMT-PFP has broken out of its passive mode, and Lien has at least shown the good sense to announce that he will not drop Soong no matter what.

ARRGGGHHH!!!

Just when you think I thought I knew what was going on. China Times reports that Chen is ahead by one point.

China Times

There are just so many conflicting numbers that one can go nuts trying to figure out what is going on. What seems to be the clear is that Lien-Soong is losing their edge, and so they are going start being more outspoken.

Here is a big piece of news Chang Rongfa, the head of Evergreen has goven a rather harsh speech against the Chen administration for neglecting Taiwanese shipping.

http://news.sina.com.tw/articles/11/46/64/11466459.html?/finance/

-- JosephWang - 02 Jan 2004