How will Lai Lead (with special guest Donovan Smith)

How did a son of a coal miner who became a Harvard-educated doctor make his way to Taiwan’s top job? It’s a tale of backstabbing, factional infighting and more factional infighting.

If you were one of the 10 or so people lucky enough to snag a seat to Donovan Smith’s recent talk with the Taipei New Liberals at the Red Room, you were treated to what was definitely the densest information download I’ve ever gotten without the aid of psychedelics. Because not only did we have the Donovan Smith, the foremost explainer of Taiwanese politics to the rest of the world, Linda Arrigo showed up. Arrigo is an American political activist who have lived in Taiwan for decades upon decades and is the ex-wife of Taiwanese statesman Shih Ming-teh.

At some point, we just went completely off the rails, but in a really valuable way? The ruling DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) is apparently just an ouroboros of factions and that fact might have gotten to be more salient as Lai comes into office. I know the shockingly vivid “hit” of getting the download will fade quickly so I’m just going to bang out this post. Good luck getting through this…you might want to get a beer first.

The first thing you need to know about a politician that gets to become the president is…they are a politician. A good one. Someone who knows how to stab somebody else in the back.

This is certainly the case with Lai Ching-te. He rose from a dirt-poor working class background to becoming a Harvard-educated doctor. For whatever reason, people in Taiwan just love electing doctors. He became the Mayor of Tainan. Now the speakership of the Tainan City Council have been bought and sold for time out of mind, but Mayor Lai refused to accept it. The Control Yuan impeached him for refusing to interact with the City Council, but it gained him national recognition for standing up to corruption. His nickname was literally “Lai the God” (賴神).

“He was a guy who literally never lost an election,” said Smith.

In comparison, the current president for another four days or so — Tsai Ing-wen —was the woman who never won an election. Until somehow she won the Big One, becoming President of Taiwan in 2016. She eventually took the popular Lai on as her Premier with the promise that he wouldn’t primary her, which he absolutely did in March, 2019.

It was a huge betrayal: he not only uncloaked his challenge at the last minute, he dropped a book release with it that showed he must have plotted it for however long it took to write a book. Tsai was caught off guard and at the ebb of her popularity, but the cat-warrior president has claws. She managed to get the primary date delayed not once, but twice, and fend off the challenge. The party was desperately divided. So she accepted her erstwhile challenger as her vice-president.

It couldn’t have been easy, but it was what it took to trounce the Kuomintang’s (KMT) popular candidate Daniel Han Guo-yu (now back as the speaker of the legislature).

Tsai 2.0?

Recent polls shows that President Tsai will departing office with unusual popularity — over 50 percent of Taiwanese approve of her after eight years in power. This is in stark contrast to the last presidents who stuck around for two terms: both the KMT’s Ma Yang-jeou and the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian found their approval in the mid-20s by the time it was time to say farewell to the presidential office. And neither handed off the presidency to someone from their own party.

It’s not surprising given Tsai’s popularity that Lai opted for continuity with the Tsai team in what Donovan called the “Foreign affairs/defense quadrangle.” He might have shifted their perspective roles, but everyone in the outside facing part of the Taiwanese government are Tsai homies.

“I pay much less attention to the domestic-facing roles,” said Smith, “domestic policy in Taiwan tend to come from the bureaucratic bowels of the Taiwanese deep state and it makes surprisingly little difference if the KMT or DPP is in power.”

What’s next for the president herself? Even after the queen leaves her palace, she could remain a valuable piece. As the president of Taiwan, she was subject to all sorts of travel restrictions. As the ex-leader, she will have both gravitas and freedom of movement, if she chooses to stay active.

Tides of Power

In Smith’s opinion there is very little to differentiate the KMT and the DPP when it comes to domestic policy. Both are captured by the strong technocratic class and both kind of govern from the center-right. But that wasn’t always the case, shared Linda Arrigo. Once there was a group within the DPP that aspired to a distinctively leftist vision. And unlike other party factions that are little more than patronage fiefdoms, this faction with an ideological core also got organized. They cultivated a clutch of think tanks and non-profit organizations to try and counter the grip of the bureaucratic class on policy. Had a sociologist to draft welfare policy and such. This is the DPP faction we call “New Tide” (新潮流).

“They were corrupted,” said Arrigo wistfully. It’s not an unfamiliar story: the leftist faction that ceased to be so left once they gained power.

No matter how much President Tsai might disavow factions in public, New Tide was the faction that put her in power according to both Arrigo and Smith. More organized and disciplined than the others, New Tide was the Kingmaker faction. Lai Ching-te is also “New Tide” even though he’s publicly said he wasn’t anymore. Sometimes it’s pretty clear, sometimes you infer someone’s factional affiliation by who they hung out with. But sometimes you’d be wrong.

Factions were banned by the party years ago. But that only made them go underground as if they were political frats. In the Tsai years, factional politics were quiescent. But this wasn’t because she got rid of them, but because she set aside “quotas” for each faction for plum jobs. This put a stop to unseemly public squabbles, but not the actual factions. New Tide got something like 40+%. The next biggest faction, the TNCPA faction only got 20% etc.

In fact, while President Tsai was in office, the “Ing-faction” comprising of politicians close to her was formed. At first she tried to deny that the faction bearing her name actually existed. Eventually, on stage with several “Ing-faction” politicos, and exasperated Tsai complained that “If you are the Ing-faction how come I never hear about any of your decisions until you’ve already made up your minds?”

“I’m still compiling data on this,” said Smith, “but it looks like President-elect Lai might not be following President Tsai’s formula for handing out jobs according to factions.”

Could factional warfare again erupt? We will know soon enough whether or not we’ll need to learn about the *check notes* the Vital Spring of Democracy faction.

Out of Control

Arrigo and Smith both vividly described large parts of the Taiwanese government — including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the military — as beyond the absolute control of the elected government. The democratically-elected president will of course pick the head of these institutions, but the rank and file are not their people. Diplomats tend to come from families of diplomats, and soldiers tend to come from families of soldiers. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a fact of life.

(From the point of view of those technocratic classes, of course, it’s the stupid political appointees that are to blame, and all they are doing is protecting the precious institutions that holds Taiwan up in the small and crafty ways that they are able.)

But there is a new and potentially more dangerous way in which control of power might slip from Lai’s grasp: there’s a chance that the opposition KMT might be usurping the role of communicating with China. This would be improper. As an opposition party, they can’t make decisions for Taiwan. But they’ve been going to China and coming back with the tantalizing possibility of huge prizes such as the restoration of Chinese tourism to Taiwan.

“That’s a multi-billion US dollar business,” said Smith, “we’re not talking about allowing exports of striped mackerel or custard apple.”

Won’t the KMT run the risk of becoming completely marginalized by the voters of Taiwan if they end up too cozy with “the enemy”? Maybe. Or maybe they will be rewarded and Lai made to accept the fruits of their “negotiations” if the people perceive instead that Lai is the problem.

So, how will Lai lead?

I feel like we spent a lot of time talking about how Lai ended up in the presidency and all the myriad challenges he will have to face up to. We even spent a lot of time talking about President Tsai’s presidency, which we are counting to the end of.

But between diving down the wild rabbit holes (apparently Smith found through looking though financial disclosures that the KMT is millions of US dollars in debt) and both speakers having to take off in order to catch their transit home, I don’t know if we really got to the heart of the question we came here to discuss.

How will Lai lead?

I guess we will find out soon enough. Mark your calendars: the inauguration is on May 20th.