by Brian Hioe

語言:
English
Photo Credit: Hou You-yi/Facebook

BONNIE GLASER, the noted Taiwan expert, recently criticized KMT presidential candidate Hou You-yi over an image released by the Hou campaign that suggested that Glaser had endorsed him. Hou later apologized for the incident.

This is not the first time that Glaser has had to criticize pan-Blue political candidates who claimed she endorsed them. This, too, occurred in May after TPP presidential candidate Ko Wen-je claimed similarly.

By contrast, however, Ko did not apologize for the incident. When questioned about it subsequently, Ko denied any knowledge of who Glaser was.

Later on, Glaser has proved critical of Ko. For example, during Ko’s failed negotiations with the KMT in forming a joint presidential ticket, Glaser suggested that Ko’s poor negotiating skills did not inspire much faith in him to negotiate with China. Glaser’s comments were screenshot and widely circulated by the pan-Green camp, so as to dissuade voters from voting for Ko on the basis of the dangers that could occur if we were negotiating with China on behalf of Taiwan, or otherwise in a position where he would have to stand up to Chinese president Xi Jinping. This, too, occurred with the more recent incident regarding Hou.

The episodes are instructive regarding how the specter of the “international” is deployed in Taiwanese politics. In particular, given the dangers Taiwan faces, it proves imperative for Taiwan to maintain the support of western allies such as the US, as a bulwark against the geopolitical threat of China.

Consequently, domestic voters are highly conscious as to how Taiwanese political candidates are interpreted abroad and viewed by international policymakers and analysts, this being an important metric as to whether they vote for such candidates or not. After all, Taiwanese traditionally vote for political candidates based on which candidates they believe will allow Taiwan to maintain its democratic freedoms in the face of China.

In this sense, international evaluations of such candidates proves significant as a metric of who to vote for. Indeed, a contributing factor to Tsai Ing-wen’s defeat in 2012 was a phone call placed to the Financial Times from the White House expressing a lack of faith in Tsai Ing-wen to stand up to China.

Nevertheless, recent incidents in which Hou or Ko tried to claim are telling with regards to how pan-Blue candidates view relations with international actors. What both incidents show is how Hou or Ko seem to only view links with international actors as short-term means to shore up domestic credibility for an election, rather than hoping to build substantive diplomatic, economic, and political relations with them.

This is particularly a challenge for the pan-Blue camp, which closed its DC office under the Ma administration. It is widely thought that this reflected how the KMT put more priority on its relations with China, and took a relative lack of interest in relations with the US during the Ma administration.

Given the successive electoral defeats faced by the KMT since then, with the electorate rejecting the KMT’s attempts to facilitate closer political and economic relations with China, the KMT has sought to rebrand since then. The KMT has touted the party’s history of relations with the US, as part of a much-vaunted pivot to the US by Eric Chu. At the same time, the genie seems to be long out of the bottle regarding skepticism of the US in the KMT, which has undercut any pivot to the US, or attempt to change views of the KMT as pro-China.

Still, Hou and Ko’s actions perhaps show how this US pivot continues to be simply for the sake of elections, rather than reflecting any genuine attempt at renewing ties with the US, with statements by western experts drawn on for electoral campaigns. It would be unlikely that any western expert would endorse any Taiwanese political candidate wholesale, to avoid allegations of interfering in Taiwanese democracy, but both the Hou and Ko campaigns have tried to claim backing by western experts as quick wins over the DPP in campaigning.

This has been especially egregious where Ko Wen-je is concerned. During visits to the US earlier this year, Ko leaked the details of confidential meetings with American Institute in Taiwan officials in short order, immediately after such meetings took place. Ko continued to do this despite being warned by aides not to do so in front of cameras, indicating that for Ko, such meetings were only for the sake of being used in domestic campaigning, as to come off as having the favor of the US, rather than due to wanting a substantive relationship with the US. The pan-Blue camp’s struggles trying to establish relations on firmer grounds with the US continue, then.
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