Decline and fall

Taiwan legislative kingmaker and spotless 'white knight' slips in the mud of Taiwan politics

Ko Wen-je. Photo: 中央資訊網

OVER THE FINAL Friday and weekend of 2024, former presidential hopeful and Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (Kē Wénzhé 柯文哲) was indicted on charges of accepting bribes and embezzling public funds; he was released on bail after being held incommunicado for four months on Saturday.

So Taiwan’s boisterous politics take a breath before inevitably returning to the ring in 2025.

“From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being there for me after four long months of waiting,” said a visibly emotional Ko, who stumbled after being led out of pre-charge detention by supporters.

Ko’s supporters – known locally as “little grass” (xiǎo cǎo, 小草) – are key players in a saga that has shaken modern traditional Taiwan politics. The reason is there in the nickname, which suggests tiny blades of grass (humble individually; powerful collectively) – a force outside the the two-party political establishment that has ruled over Taiwan since the year 2000.

In 2000 former president Chen Shui-bian (Chén Shuǐbiǎn, 陳水扁) led the pro-Taiwan Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to power, leading to a two-term oscillation, green to blue, and blue to green – the colors respectively of the DPP and the KMT.

That is, until Lai Ching-te (Lài Qīngdé 賴清德) led the DPP to power for a third term in January (2024) handily defeating the KMT’s Hou Yu-ih (Hóu Yǒuyí 侯友宜) by some six points.

Did Ko’s 26 percent of January 2024’s presidential election significantly slew the outcome in favor of one of the two entrenched two big political parties in Taiwan? The truth is that his time-for-change campaigning undoubtedly cost the DPP many young votes. It probably also cost many would-be KMT voters, who saw Ko as a “safe,” less “radical” alternative to the KMT.

Ko, like the KMT, after all, is opportunistically free from ideology and more likely to strive for a deal with the looming Godzilla of the East over the Taiwan Strait.

But to get this into some kind of perspective big picture, consider Bernie Sanders running as a third-party candidate in the US and getting a quarter of the vote in a presidential election. That's somewhat what Ko Wen-je and his Taiwan People's Party delivered in Taiwan's 2024 presidential election. Like Sanders, Ko positioned himself as an outsider challenging the established political order, appealing especially to younger voters frustrated with traditional politics.

Yes, Taiwan's political system differs from that of the US. It's a single-round election, unlike the US electoral college system. Ko's stated policies and ideology don’t map onto Sanders’, but they appealed to younger voters disaffected with conventional power structures. The comparison helps in terms of grasping how significant it was for a third-party candidate to capture over a quarter of the Taiwan presidential vote in what had historically been a two-party dominated system.

"It's now no longer a two horse race, it's a three horse race," political scientist and non-resident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub Wen-ti Sung commented at the time.

After positioning the campaign as a “third way” between the KMT and the DPP, Ko and the TPP had arrived as a third force in Taiwan politics.

That makes the fact that Ko’s facing 28-1/2 years in jail – at least if the prosecution gets its way, which most commentators in Taiwan think it won’t – such a fall. He’s gone from running Taiwan’s equivalent of a “drain-the-swamp,” “out with the old, in with the new” campaign to personifying the politics he previously challenged.

It’s always a bad move to “chill the hearts,” as it’s put in Chinese, of your most ardent supporters, and in this case support for Ko when he was placed in pre-charge confinement was tepid.

As Rex How, a publisher and one-time adviser to former KMT president Ma Ying-jeou, told The Diplomat, if the electoral spending scandal had not happened “there would have been many more of … [Ko’s] supporters protesting outside the court [following Ko’s detainment].”

“It could’ve been 20,000 people; instead, it was about 200.”

KO’S POLITICAL CAREER was preceded by a fall from grace. As an attending physician and director of the surgical ICU at National Taiwan University Hospital, his professional life nosedived in 2011 when HIV-infected organs were transplanted into five patients under his watch.

In August 2012, the Control Yuan, Taiwan’s top watchdog body, impeached Ko for medical malpractice and referred him to the Public Functionaries Disciplinary Sanction Commission for disciplinary punishment. In 2013, he was demoted by two ranks despite Ko’s claims of innocence.

The impeachment flagged “neglecting his duties as head of the hospital’s organ transplant task force by entrusting non-qualified staff with writing prescriptions and interpreting exam results,” according to one local news report.

The HIV-positive exam result was written in English, it was reported at the time, leading to confusion amid the “non-qualified” staff.

It might be interpreted as a kind of sloppiness that would come back to haunt him later.

Ko’s latest indictment, as Angelica Oung puts it in her Substack, Taipology, is a “sprawling 190-page PDF indictment document … [that] contains juicy details such as how Ko likes to refer to himself as ‘his majesty’ [zhèn 朕 – the imperial first-person pronoun used exclusively by Chinese emperors from the Qin Dynasty onwards] in front of his staff and lurid descriptions of interactions with the moneyed class that belies Ko’s image as a swamp-drainer.”

Putting aside the tome-like prosecutorial case (critics say some of the accusations lack substance but agree the prosecution will nail him on one or two counts), it appears that, as Oung sums up, “Ko’s camp is simply extraordinarily sloppy and naive when it comes to money and the law.”

That’s probably understating the case. What is likely to be particularly galling to his followers is his haughty hubris. Admittedly, some – like the 200 protestors at the time of his confinement – were not going down without a fight. One was even arrested in September for threatening to kill the judges and prosecutors behind Ko’s incarceration.

But most supporters were left with a man who did not declare the finances for his election campaign and was caught shredding notes with instructions to his generals to flee the country – not to mention internal audits of the finances of his electoral PR firm. One founding member of Ko’s TPP told Chinese-language media, “The party is a one-voice system with no party discipline, lacking formal correspondence.”

Ko, gaffe-prone, frequently described by local commentators as '“narcissistic,” “superficial” and “patronizing,” known known as “Ko P” or “Professor Ko” to his supporters, Instagram- and YouTube-friendly, loftily above the fray, was being sucked into the muddy eddies of Taiwan politics.

Taiwan’s political third force – what is left of the TPP – was either spent or will have to reinvent itself without the “one voice” that led to its creation.

But something was never “right” about Ko – making it somewhat remarkable that things ever came to this. After all, the Taiwan Urological Association was not alone in calling out his wit when he likened cross-strait relations to prostate cancer – a metaphor about the need to co-exist with one’s enemies.

In attempting to position himself as at best a partially aligned solo player in Taiwan’s politics – neither 100 percent KMT nor, ultimately, with the more ideologically driven DPP – Ko was always at risk of taking a hit, making it imperative that the TPP be a particularly tight ship.

It was not. It appears most likely that Ko bought his own BS, possibly even to the extent that not only members of his own party were beneath him but the entire political system was too.

A commentator in the local English-language media ahead of the elections that brought the DPP’s Lai Ching-te to power said, “Many of Ko’s supporters expect a ‘rule-breaker’.”

As Kurt Vonnegut said of his vocation, fiction: "Learn the rules before breaking them.” In the non-fictional world, Ko appears to have never grasped that – and his own narrative eclipsed him.

Some Housekeeping …

… As substackers call it (thanks to Bill Bishop, I believe): ChinaDiction has been sunning in Beidaihe for far too long due to what I’m calling the “three unexpecteds” – an unexpected sojourn in Taiwan (which actually involved working); an unexpected bout of ill health; and an unexpected departure from Taiwan.

That was enough to turn everything upside down until very recently.

ChinaDiction is back, and looking ahead, posts will be likely less frequent and less “greater sinosphere” all-encompassing than before. Expect more zooms into interesting cross-strait issues peppered with book reviews. Today’s book review is Ian Johnson’s Sparks.

Book Review

Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future

Ian Johnson

Penguin

373 pages

⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

Ian Johnson’s latest book – the writer should need no introduction to China watchers – could have been called something awful like “Remembering” because it’s about forgotten things, things salvaged from the cracks of collective memory by candle-bearers keeping the past alive.

But instead it’s inspired by a tiny magazine, “Spark,” which had a brief and far from widely read run in 1960. Unknown in China, the university-student samizdat germinated amid rural poverty and the famine failures of the Great Leap Forward. Those behind it were sentenced to decades in prison. During the Cultural Revolution, a few years later, two were executed.

A video documentary by semi-underground filmmaker Hu Jie (hú jié 胡杰) is available on YouTube – highly recommended and with welcome English subtitles, because those hinterland accents are nonstop curve balls even for those who fancy themselves as solid Chinese speakers .

Johnson’s quest is counter-historians like those involved with “Spark” …

Independent writers, artists, and filmmakers [who] still produce works about government-induced famines, political campaigns, massacres, and virus outbreaks. Their goal: to challenge, destabilize, and contest the state’s version of reality. With success by no means certain, they carry on, believing that history vindicates the truth.

That takes us first to Dao County in southern Hunan where in 1967 more than 9,000 “class enemies” were massacred by CCP cadres in Dao County, their bodies tossed into a river to decompose. It takes us to Jiabiangou (the “Ditch”), a labor camp in Gansu, where thousands of prisoners were driven by starvation into cannibalism in the late 1950s – two things among far too many that the CCP would prefer that everybody forgot.

After all China’s central government demands total control over the guiding narrative. Forget that and be accused of “historical nihilism.”

Nihilism is Xi Jinping’s grab-all put down for any thinking that pushes back on the CCP fairy tale about being behind the most enlightened – and “correct” – governance in the world.

All the same, a small minority truck in “nothingness” that is banned in Xi’s China.

Underground historians had been exploring the dark corners of the Communist Party’s history since the 1940s, but digital technologies meant that their work could be republished and reach millions of people through social media, blogs, and some traditional media outlets.

Counter history – nuanced details kept alive by underground barefoot historians, so to speak, are a source of hope for Johnson, and not simply in China:

It is also part of a global trend. In fact, if we look at our own countries—in Africa, the Americas, Asia, or Europe—we can see that we are all in the midst of a memory boom—an ever-expanding number of books, movies, exhibitions, and works of art that try to make sense of the present through a past. And more often than not, this past is increasingly recounted by eyewitnesses. In Western countries, that trend began in the aftermath of World War I. Mass literacy, cheap publishing, and the new movie industry helped millios of people understand this traumatic war through the concept of shell shock.

One would only be so mean-spirited as to give Sparks four stars if they’d already read Johnson’s Souls of China, and hoped for something equally compelling and coherent. Yes, Sparks occasionally seems somewhat patched together from old notes, but it’s important in a way that few books are about China, and that’s more than enough.