Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Lai Ching-te/Facebook
PRESIDENT LAI CHING-TE has begun a series of ten speeches to be held nationwide, aimed at establishing political unity.
Lai’s speeches are probably directed at the recalls. Namely, Lai is attempting to drive up national participation in the recalls through his speeches, as would benefit the DPP electorally.
This has not prevented the Chinese government from attempting to frame statements by Lai as de facto declarations of independence. During his first speech, Lai referred to the nation as a “country” and emphasized that the PRC has never controlled Taiwan. The first speech, too, mostly proved a history lesson on the juridical history of international agreements regarding Taiwan’s sovereignty.
The speech was responded to by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO), which framed Lai’s comments as “a ‘Taiwan independence’ declaration that blatantly incited cross-strait confrontation, and a hodgepodge of ‘Taiwan independence’ fallacies and heresies full of errors and omissions.”
To this extent, the KMT framed Lai’s first speech, too, as a pro-independence provocation that showed that Lai was intent on pushing for a benshengren nationalist agenda. The KMT later honed in on comments by Lai in his second speech that stated, “Hammer after hammer, tempered into steel and removed of all impurities, until all that’s left is steel-willed determination to defend our sovereignty and safeguard our democracy.”
The KMT has suggested that “impurities” refer to political forces that Lai would seek to politically purge, along the lines of its current claims that Lai is engaged in “Green Communism” or a “Green Terror” directed at Taiwan. To this extent, as Lai made these comments at the Taoyuan Hakka Youth Association, KMT chair Eric Chu suggested that Lai sought to purge Hakka, waishengren, and other languages in favor of Taiwanese Hokkien nationalism.
In this framing, Chu is probably hoping to depict Lai as Chen Shui-bian 2.0, in that Chen leaned into Taiwanese Hokkien nationalism in order to boost flagging support in his presidential administration. More broadly, the KMT has sought to frame the present DPP as analogous to the Chen administration, seeing itself as successful in using such tactics to oust the DPP and return to power after the end of the Chen administration, and hoping to repeat these tactics.
It is more probable that Lai is largely seeking to drive up turnout among those who are already in the pan-Green camp. Nor was Lai saying anything new in terms of cross-strait relations. This has not prevented some international observers from interpreting Lai’s speech as the TAO has framed it, as any statement by Lai is likely to be interpreted by them. Indeed, Lai’s speech is generally understood domestically as about the recalls, and there would have been far stronger political responses domestically if they had genuinely been interpreted as a pretext for declaring independence.
Lai’s speeches have been successful insofar as sometimes the KMT’s efforts to attack him on the basis of what he says have backfired. An example proves Taichung mayor Lu Shiow-yen’s reaction to the speeches, in that she claimed that Lai’s statement that the PRC has never controlled Taiwan is merely his “personal historical view.” This statement was leveraged upon by the pan-Green camp to point to how the KMT is overly accommodating of China, in that it is a historical fact that the PRC, which was founded in 1949, has never controlled Taiwan. The effort would be to give the KMT rope to hang themselves with, then.
On the other hand, the content of Lai’s subsequent speeches may have been aimed at conveying the image that he has sought to reach across the political aisle. Actions by Lai that signal a willingness for bipartisanship, such as inviting the leaders of the TPP and KMT to a bipartisan national security meeting, are effective when the pan-Blue camp turns down these invitations.
It is to be seen to what extent Lai leans into recall campaigning. Lai has to date maintained a fairly high approval rating because he has avoided engaging in partisanship and kept out of the day-to-day fray of political squabbling between the DPP and KMT. Instead, Lai has benefited from the split between the premiership and presidency, allowing Premier Cho Jung-tai to do most of the political fighting. But Lai may shift to a more combative stance ahead of elections, even if his administration has previously denied accusations from the KMT that it would shuffle the cabinet to a “war cabinet” with a more aggressive posture for the recalls.