Incumbent Ma Re-Elected as Taiwan’s President

Published: January 14, 2012

Jason Lee/Reuters

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Reuters

Tsai Ing-wen, the Democratic Progressive Party candidate for president, cast her ballot in Taiwan's elections Saturday.

A second term for Mr. Ma is likely to please Beijing, which has matched his enthusiasm for cross-strait rapprochement with a variety of economic and trade pacts. During his tenure Taiwanese exports and investment on the mainland have soared; at home, the local economy has been buoyed by more than 3 million mainland tourists who began arriving shortly after his inauguration.

Those policies, and the wealth that flowed to exporters, helped solidify his support among business leaders and investors. More than 200,000 citizens who live and work in China returned home to vote, most of them taking the direct flights that Mr. Ma helped establish during his first year in office. Not surprisingly, many of the returnees were Ma supporters spurred by surveys that had showed him in a neck-and-neck bid for survival.

With more than 80 percent of the vote counted, The Associated Press reported that Mr. Ma, 61, of the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, was leading Ms. Tsai, 55 of the Democratic Progressive Party, by about six percentage points. A third candidate, James Soong of the People First Party, who was expected to siphon off as much a tenth of the electorate from Mr. Ma, only received 2.8 percent of the vote, the AP reported.

It was the fifth presidential contest since Taiwan emerged from single-party rule in 1996.

Beijing had no immediate comment on Mr. Ma’s victory but Communist Party officials in recent months had made no secret of their antipathy toward Ms. Tsai and her Democratic Progressive Party, which has long championed political independence. Although Ms. Tsai had moderated her party’s stance in recent months, many voters recalled the eight years of President Chen Shui-bian of Democratic Progressive Party whose antagonism toward China soured relations. “What this election showed is that business interests in Taiwan now trump ideology ones,” said Edward I-hsin Chen, a political scientists at Tamkang University in Taipei. “There is no turning back on relations with China.”

Taiwan and China have been in a formal state of war since 1949, when the Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war and fled the mainland, establishing their rival Republic of China government in Taipei. In the ensuing decades, China has not budged on its overriding goal: to bring Taiwan back into the fold, even if it requires force.

Except for the eight years of Mr. Chen’s presidency, the Nationalists have governed the island, including four decades of martial law.

Since Mr. Ma’s election, China’s senior leaders have expended a great deal of political and economic capital trying to woo the island’s skeptical citizenry. The relatively close margin, however, highlights the deep divisions among an electorate still wary of China’s intentions.

Dealing with China may prove far more complicated during Mr. Ma’s second term, analysts say, because after the low-hanging fruits of trade and transportation pacts, Beijing may seek to tackle thorny political issues. “I think it’s clear that much of what has been accomplished has been a set of easy issues,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The upcoming agenda could include much tougher issues.”

The economic benefits from Mr. Ma’s first term have been pronounced. A landmark trade agreement between the two sides removed tariffs on hundreds of products, helping to boost Taiwan’s exports to China to $115 billion last year, a 35 percent from 2009. Spending by mainland tourists has pumped $3 billion into the local economy. Late fall, the first 1,000 mainland students began enrolling in local universities.

Much of the day-to-day campaign, however, focused on retail politics, with Ms. Tsai mining popular anxiety over the island’s slide from the heady 1990s, when reliably double-digit economic growth from high-tech manufacturing helped earn Taiwan a place among the so-called Asian Tigers.

High expectations among Taiwan’s people partly explain widespread dissatisfaction that persists despite an unemployment rate of 4.28 percent. Many here blame Mr. Ma for stagnant wages and a growing wealth gap that has made housing unaffordable for millions of middle-class Taiwanese.

But a plurality of voters appeared to side with Mr. Ma’s contention that improved relations with China were the island’s best hope for prosperity. Although she has no interest in unification, Chao Pei-nan, a housewife, 55, said there was nothing to be gained by alienating China. “Isolation will do us no good,” said Ms. Chao, who returned here from New Zealand last week to vote. “In fact, the closer we get to China, the more they will see the benefits of democracy and freedom and the better the chance we have to influence them.”