Storms from the south

I recently watched Wu'er Kaixi, the former Tiananmen student leader, being mobbed by local day-trippers at a southern Taiwan tourist site. I asked a smiling middle-aged lady, who was standing in line for a photograph with one of China's most-wanted, what the fuss was about.

'Democracy,' she said. 'He stood up to China.'

If Taiwan's pro-independence stirrings keep Beijing's leaders awake at night, it's the south that should make them toss and turn. The mood there is unflinchingly anti-China. As a demure young personal secretary to the Tainan county magistrate put it to me: 'If you live down here [in the south], you realise the outlook is completely different [from the north]. We think we're an independent country and we shouldn't give in to threats; if anything we should resist them even more strongly.'

Her tone was one of poised defiance. And driven by the south, defiance has become the signature note of a presidential campaign that is building up to a showdown between the ruling Democratic Progressive Party - whose power base is in the south - and the opposition coalition, which will be relying on business-minded northern voters to usher it into power on March 20.

How times change. Just months ago it seemed inevitable that the Kuomintang-People's First Party Alliance of Lien Chan and James Soong Chu-yu would win the March election. After all, Chen Shui-bian - who garnered slightly less than 40 per cent of the popular vote in 2000 - has presided over an unprecedented period of economic decline in Taiwan, while Mr Lien and Mr Soong, who took around 60 per cent of the 2000 vote, offered the promise of a back-to-business approach to China.

It now seems possible that the southern wild-card might upset that calculation. Local observers are divided about the reasons for this. For some, the south is in the grips of a dangerous nationalist movement whipped up by the likes of former KMT president turned pro-independence firebrand Lee Teng-hui. For others, passions in the south are the result of neglect during the long years of KMT rule and the perception that China has not only bullied Taiwan for too long on the world stage but is now taking jobs from the poorer south as businesses migrate across the Taiwan Strait. The truth is likely a combination of both.

Southerners - who often refer to the island's capital as a 'Chinese city' - like to say that the foreign visitor who lingers only in Taipei has yet to see the real Taiwan, and there's some truth in this. Simply crossing the city boundaries reveals differences: betel nut stands - usually staffed by scantily clad young women - start to appear by the roadside; people are more likely to speak the Taiwanese dialect of Hokkien, or perhaps Hakka; and Taipei's relative sophistication and modernity tends to retreat the further south you travel. By the time you reach the southern counties of Yunlin or, further south again, Tainan, there's a temple on every street corner, the cuisine has changed and Taiwanese is the language of everyday life.

As former Tainan county magistrate and DPP veteran Mark Chen put it, Taipei is essentially a creation of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, or Kuomintang, who made the northern city their power base when they were evicted from the mainland by a victorious Mao Zedong. As the temporary capital of all China, says Mr Chen, an immigrant Chinese elite took the city's top positions and turned it into the island's centre for trade and education. 'In the early days under Chiang Kai-shek's rule,' he says, 'the budget for Taipei was more than the whole of southern Taiwan.'

The sense of neglect this created made the south the perfect breeding ground for opposition politics, and the south remains the DPP's stronghold, despite the fact the party has received little in the way of praise for its term at the helm of the island.

In the December 2002 Taipei mayoral elections, for example, the KMT's Ma Ying-jeou beat the DPP's Lee Ying-yuan by 28 per cent. But in the southern city of Kaohsiung, the DPP's Frank Hsieh was re-elected and the DPP gained a majority in the municipal assembly for the first time.

'The south is poorer and unemployment rates are higher, which means people down there are not voting on the economy,' says National Taiwan University political scientist Lee Si-kuen, who fears that growing Taiwan nationalism looks set to upset the delicate cross-Strait balance and result in military action from China.

In the 2000 presidential elections Chen Shui-bian averaged about 48 per cent of the vote in the eight southern municipalities, excluding the offshore island of Penghu. And that, say many in the south, is likely to rise significantly in March, buoyed by enthusiasm for the president's apparent conversion to a get-tough attitude with China.

'In the north, people are concerned that the economy is declining, but it's worse here in the south and people are more dissatisfied. But people support Chen's long-term political policies,' says Tainan City Mayor Hsu Tain-tsair, who notes that, according to DPP polls, if the undecided vote of 28.5 per cent is excluded, Chen Shui-bian currently has a support rating of 62 per cent, against just 38 per cent for the opposition.

Tainan County Magistrate Su Huan-chih agrees, noting: 'The feeling in the south is that it's China that has taken their jobs and that a vote for the opposition will just exacerbate the problem.'

Most southerners agree that it was Lee Teng-hui - who in mid-2001 formed the pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union in frustration at what he saw as Taiwan's increasing integration with China - who shifted the goal posts of the upcoming election. His rallies for a change of name for the island from the Republic of China to Taiwan attracted crowds of tens of thousands and led DPP campaign strategists to think again about how best to give incumbent Chen Shui-bian a second shot at the presidency.

The result has been a campaign marked by fierce anti-China rhetoric, and which has proven so effective in closing the gap between the DPP and the opposition in the polls that it has forced the KMT to drop long-standing ideological positions and assume a platform that increasingly mirrors the party that defeated it in the last <243>elections.

And the heat, says County Magistrate Su, is likely to mount, with the DPP planning further rallies, one of which he refers to as 'a consolidated mass action across the country' to mark the anniversary of the February 28, 1947, massacre of Taiwanese intellectuals by Nationalist troops. The rally, he says, is likely to involve tens of thousands of people linking hands from the south of Taiwan to the north of Taiwan in a 'peaceful plea' to China to remove its threat of military force if all other paths to reunification turn out to be blind allies.

It's an action that will no doubt feed fires of southern anti-Chinese sentiment even further, and that is precisely what worries northerners like National Taiwan University's Mr Lee.

'This is a nationalist movement that has its own momentum,' he says. 'There's no stopping it.'

Sissy Chen, a former DPP member and now an independent legislator, agrees.

'The only way the DPP can get 50 per cent of the vote is to appeal to anti-Chinese sentiment,' she says. 'The problem is that it becomes a nationalist movement defined by anti-Chineseness. We are being led into a period of political instability.'