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A big balancing act awaits Taiwan’s president-elect
By Keith Bradsher
Sunday, March 23, 2008
TAIPEI: Growing up in Taiwan as the only boy among five children, Ma Ying-jeou bore the weight of his father’s expectations.
His father, a champion runner in high school and college, took him on long runs during his late teens after initially viewing his son as too lazy to achieve athletic success. Determined that his son should be a broad-minded gentleman with a sense of national purpose, the elder Ma demanded that his son study the Chinese classics and spend extra hours after school every day mastering Chinese calligraphy.
Out of that upbringing came a fiercely determined man who sleeps five hours a night, jogs regularly at dawn - and on Saturday won the presidency of Taiwan with a broad mandate to negotiate closer relations with mainland China.
"Although at the time I felt very much - well, sometimes - bothered, looking back I appreciate his role," Ma said in an interview Sunday, particularly recalling the many evenings he spent practicing brush strokes.
Ma (whose full name is pronounced Ma ING-je-o) will need all his energy and discipline as president, having raised expectations during the campaign. He has pledged to negotiate closer relations with Beijing but continues to castigate Chinese leaders for human rights abuses and support the Dalai Lama’s calls for Tibetan autonomy.
His wide margin of victory - he beat Frank Hsieh of the Democratic Progressive Party by a vote of 58 percent to 42 percent Saturday - puts him in a very strong position to carry out his agenda, political analysts said.
He has promised to stimulate Taiwan’s struggling economy by opening up trade with China and letting in Chinese tourists, but now faces a global economic slowdown. And he has vowed to run a clean government but leads a party with a long history of corruption and thuggery so ingrained that when Ma tried to investigate illegal deals while serving as justice minister in the mid-1990s, he quickly lost his job and wound up as an assistant professor at a local university.
Throughout his career, Ma, who has a doctorate in legal studies from Harvard, has taken legally precise positions that sometimes have been politically popular and sometimes have not.
"He’s very lawyerly, and his first reaction to events is to fall back on principles and the legal ramifications," said Douglas Paal, who was the director from 2002 to 2006 of the American Institute in Taiwan, which handles American diplomatic interests here in the absence of full diplomatic relations. "It has given him an ability to respond to any issue that comes up in Taiwan, and there seems to be one every three days."
Rebuilding Taiwan’s relationship with its longtime protector, the United States, is part of a difficult balancing act that awaits Ma as he prepares for his inauguration on May 20.
Ma said Sunday that he wants to negotiate confidence-building military procedures with Beijing to reduce the risk of an accidental war and eventually a peace agreement ending hostilities across the Taiwan Straits.
But he also needs to allay the suspicions of American conservatives who value Taiwan as a strategic counterweight to China and who remain distrustful of Ma’s Nationalist Party because of its reluctance for years to approve the purchase of submarines and other military hardware first offered by President George W. Bush in 2001.
Ma is seeking close relations with Japan, another close ally of the United States and one that shares the American commitment to preserving the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. But Ma also has a long track record of infuriating Japan by arguing that it should hand over a cluster of small, contested islands to Taiwan - he even wrote his doctoral thesis at Harvard on the subject.
Ma, 57, offered on Sunday a mechanism and a formula for achieving a peace agreement with the mainland. For starters, he said that peace negotiations should be handled through two semi-official foundations set up with government backing in the early 1990s: the Straits Exchange Foundation, which Ma helped establish on the Taiwan side, and Beijing’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits.
Using semi-official organizations to conduct talks, instead of government agencies, is like shaking hands while wearing white gloves, Ma said. "If you wear a white glove, it is still courteous, but it is not your actual flesh," he said.
The trickier task is to find a formula that balances Beijing’s position that Taiwan is a breakaway province and Taiwan’s position that it is a sovereign country as the legal continuation of the Republic of China, the government that replaced imperial rule in China. Ma said that he accepted the so-called 1992 consensus, in which Taiwanese and mainland officials reached an informal understanding, never issued as a formal document, that there is one China but that the two sides interpret differently.
Ma offered another formulation Sunday, saying that sovereignty issues were too difficult to resolve but that the two sides would have to move beyond denying the legal existence of each other. He described this approach as "mutual non-denial," while providing few details.
Ma may be at a disadvantage in reassuring Taiwan’s people that he can strike a hard bargain with Beijing because he comes from a mainland family and was born in Hong Kong - although with a Taiwan connection, as he mentioned at a press conference on Sunday morning.
"I was biologically conceived in Taiwan, although I was born in Hong Kong, so technically I was made in Taiwan," he said.
Ma’s wife, Chow Mei-ching, is a lawyer for a government-controlled Taiwanese bank and takes pride in riding the bus to work every day; he said in the interview that she was welcome to continue doing so after he took office, but that she would make the final decision.
The couple have two grown daughters, both of whom live in the United States.
After obtaining his doctorate in 1981, Ma became a translator for President Chiang Ching-kuo and rose quickly through the Nationalist Party ranks. Ma’s father was a mid-ranking functionary in the Nationalist Party.
Two of the earliest signs of a likely thaw in relations with Beijing may be shaggy and four-legged: Ma said that Taiwan would be happy to accept Beijing’s three-year-old offer of two pandas.
"We have already prepared our zoo for that purpose," said Ma, a former mayor of Taipei. "We’ve already trained our employees to grow the bamboo they eat."
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