Taiwan rivals beat drums for status quo

TAIWAN'S 17 million voters appear set to elect as president today Ma Ying-jeou, the candidate of the Kuomintang (Nationalists), who is committed to negotiating with China for a European-style common market and for direct air and shipping links across the long-tense strait.

TAIWAN'S 17 million voters appear set to elect as president today Ma Ying-jeou, the candidate of the Kuomintang (Nationalists), who is committed to negotiating with China for a European-style common market and for direct air and shipping links across the long-tense strait.

Mr Ma has been leading the polls handsomely since the party he chairs won 81 of 113 seats in the parliamentary election two months ago.

However, there has not been a resurgence of faith in the party that ruled the island for decades under the iron fist of dictator Chiang Kai-shek.

The KMT's likely return to power owes more to having a credible and moderate leader in 57-year-old Harvard Law School graduate Mr Ma, and to disillusionment with the economic failure and corruption of the eight-year rule of the "pan-green" Democratic Progressive Party's President Chen Shui-bian.

Taiwan's stock market surged by 2 per cent yesterday on market expectations that a Ma administration would be pro-business, and would consider lucrative privatisations of public assets.

At the last election, a mentally unstable man shot at Mr Chen with a home-made gun, grazing his stomach and apparently handing Mr Chen crucial sympathy votes.

Late yesterday, a former US official in Taiwan, Therese Shaheen - a strong DPP supporter - gave interviews claiming that Mr Ma had retained a valid green card from his residency in the US in the 1980s, implying that he is less than fully committed to Taiwan.

This reinforces DPP criticisms that because he was born in Hong Kong to a KMT official who had fled China, he is really a "mainlander", not truly Taiwanese.

The US has deployed two aircraft carriers near Taiwan on "scheduled routine operations".

Mr Ma's DPP opponent today - the constitution rules that Mr Chen must stand down after two terms - is Frank Hsieh, also a former lawyer and also a former mayor. He is widely perceived as competent, and he too is seeking closer economic links with China.

Andrew Yang, secretary general of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, said: "Supporters of Hsieh say that if the KMT wins, it will revert to the old party-state mainland thinking, and that Taiwan's newly gained sense of identity will be sacrificed."

Neither Mr Ma nor most of today's "pan-blue" KMT are perceived by voters as likely to turn back the clock and kowtow to Beijing.

Since Taiwan's first presidential election in 1996, won by Lee Teng-hui - then the KMT leader, although on Thursday he urged voters to back Mr Hsieh - the island-state's political and social centre of gravity has shifted immensely. Today, almost 70 per cent of people surveyed say they view themselves as Taiwanese rather than as Chinese, while Mr Ma and his running mate, Vincent Siew - a former premier with close links to Australia - wish to defuse tensions across the strait. They have not even mentioned unification during the election campaign.

The focus instead is on the status quo, which Su Hao of Beijing's Foreign Affairs University said was also acceptable to China's leadership.

Professor Su said China would prefer Mr Ma chiefly because he could be relied on not to raise the prospect of independence for Taiwan.

Taipei airport has been packed as about 200,000 voters have flown back to Taiwan from China, where they work. Most are expected to favour Mr Ma.