Taiwan’s presidential election season shifts into higher gear as KMT's Eric Chu starts campaign
Less than three months before the January 2016 Taiwan presidential election, the real fight between the three candidates began on Tuesday as the new presidential nominee of the ruling Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT) started his campaign.
Speaking on a radio show on Tuesday, KMT Chairman Eric Chu apologised to New Taipei citizens to whom he had previously promised he would not run in the 2016 race, which will be held in conjunction with legislative polls.
Chu was nominated by his party to stand in the electoral contest last weekend after the party’s highest decision making body rescinded its earlier nomination of Hung Hsiu-chu, the deputy legislative speaker, because of her declining popularity.
Read more: Dumped and replaced: Eric Chu to lead ticket after Taiwan's ruling Nationalist Party kicks out unpopular Hung Hsiu-chu
He began three-months of leave from his job as New Taipei mayor on Tuesday in order to concentrate on his campaign.
As Taiwan attaches great importance to Japan and the United States, the island’s presidential candidates usually visit these two strategic partners in the run-up to the election.
While Tsai Ing-wen, the presidential candidate for the main opposition Democratic Progressive Party, has already visited the two countries, Chu said he was also assessing the possibility of doing the same.
Kuo Yun-kung, director of the KMT’s Department of Overseas Affairs, who is in the US, said that Washington had never stopped inviting the party’s presidential candidate to go there for a visit, but the key was time.
On relations with China, Chu proposed to strengthen the so-called “1992 consensus” so both sides of the Taiwan Strait could move from maintaining the current peaceful development to creating a win-win situation through bilateral cooperation.
The reference is an agreement said to have been reached between the KMT and the Communist Party of China in 1992, which states that there is only one China and that each side can interpret in their own way what that means.
Read more: Eyes on frontrunner Tsai Ing-wen as Taiwan presidential poll may mark shift in ties with Beijing
James Soong, the presidential candidate of the People First Party, said on Tuesday that he did not need to visit the US, but instead “they should come to see me” – and they did.
Soong said that although Japan was “an important ally” of Taiwan, he would not seek to form a military alliance with the East Asian neighbour to counter China if elected.
PFP legislator Lee Tung-hao told Kyodo that Soong was unlikely to visit Japan before the election mainly because of time constraints.
Quoting the late Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew, the PFP legislator emphasised that Taiwan needed to try to maximise the space it had to manoeuvre among the big “trees” in the region, referring to China, Japan and the US.
“It is not right to depend on one country alone,” he said.
Pledging to “maintain the status quo” of the Taiwan Strait, Soong said that, if elected, he intended to maintain the status of Taiwan’s freedom and democracy, the existence of the Republic of China – the official name of the island, and the self-determination of the Taiwanese people.
Owing to public displeasure with the performance of the KMT administration, Soong promised to “change the status quo” of dysfunctional governments, helpless Taiwanese public and economic benefits monopolised by big businesses and cross-strait brokers.
Tsai, who has been leading the polls, has also proposed to “maintain the status quo” of the Taiwan Strait, but she has declined to specify how she plans to put her policy into practice.
While she had previously declined to explain what she meant by “the status quo”, she has recently defined it as maintaining Taiwan’s free and democratic way of life and constitutional system and maintaining peaceful and stable relations across the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan and China have been governed separately since they split amid a civil war in 1949. While Taipei still calls itself the Republic of China and claims the mainland as part of its territory, Beijing has long threatened to use force, if necessary, to reunite both sides under the leadership of the People’s Republic of China.
Despite Tsai’s reassurance, many people are worried that cross-strait relations would return to the kind of deadlock seen when the independence-leaning party ruled the island from 2000 to 2008.
The party’s platform stipulates that its goal is to pursue an independent country named the Republic of Taiwan.
Beijing has regarded the “Taiwan independence clause” as a primary roadblock to any possible engagement with the DPP.
Official registration for the presidential election is slated for late next month and televised platform presentations or debates are scheduled for December and January.
