Left Flank

The CSM asks, "Will Beijing ever get the point?"

Time is on Taiwan's side as its democracy matures and its de facto independence becomes widely accepted. The "new" KMT cannot now return to its old authoritarian, corrupt ways or it will lose the very US support that keeps Taiwan from being swallowed by the dragon and allows democracy to flourish.

The US showed its resolve to defend Taiwan in 1996 during a cross-strait crisis in which China lobbed "test" missiles toward the island. Now this potential flash point of Asia has used its democracy once again to show the world – and especially China – how a people can collectively correct their leaders through ballots instead of bullets.

Shall I punctuate the point, after last year's 17th Party Congress farce? "The March 22 election was the second time this 'Chinese democracy' saw a transfer of power, serving as a model for what China could be." Michael Turton, even in his despair, adds color.

Another thing -- the atmosphere in Taipei is nightmarish. Never again will I spend an election there -- the conventional wisdom is totally out of touch with the reality of the electorate. In 2004 I stayed in Taichung and got a pretty good line on what would happen, but not this time. I used to describe what circulates in Taipei as a cloud cuckoo-land of KMT talking points, but even that isn't right -- I lack a good grip on the kind of language to characterize its vast and all-encompassing wrongness. As reporters were churning out articles saying that the election was going to be tight Ma win, as speakers everywhere were retreating to positions of nervous ambiguity, and people talking to both campaigns said it would be tight, voters were preparing to hand Ma a 17 point victory. On Friday the DPP was saying it was seeing a late surge for Frank Hsieh, which I didn't report because it so obviously reeked of lying spin. But some apparently did. Nobody I talked to in the capital even got a whiff of a 17 point Ma victory, though all thought he'd win. Certainly somebody knew, because there were massive capital inflows into Taiwan in the last week before the election as international capital prepared to hollow out Taiwan like a gourd invest in our fine nation in anticipation of a Ma victory. Ironically, the nearest polls were the nutcase polls in the pro-Ma papers, though a close examination will show they were nowhere near correct either.

Voter patterns! I'll have a full discussion on them later this week. One thing that really really really stands out here is the desperate need for thorough, credible, detailed survey work that is reliable through time. Tomorrow's analyses in Taipei are going to be largely groups of people talking without the numbers to back them up.

It all sounds like a modern democracy, even if most news organizations have their own pro-Beijing spin.

Should we keep a vigil for KMT autocracy?