MCLC: authoritarianism lite in Taipei

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Terry Russell <Terry.Russell at umanitoba.ca>
Subject: authoritarianism lite in Taipei
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Source: 
http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chinapolicyinstitute/2014/05/01/taipei-flirts
-with-authoritarianism-lite-amid-political-crisis/#.U2IpjQcfV4c.facebook

Taipei flirts with ‘authoritarianism lite’ amid political crisis
Written by J. Michael Cole.

As the political crisis pitting civil society against the Ma Ying-jeou
administration deepens, Taiwanese authorities are adopting countermeasures
that, to many observers, are unfit for a democratic system and evidence
that the government is getting desperate.

More than a month after the Sunflower Movement burst into the Legislative
Yuan and launched a three-week occupation that shook the nation at its
foundations, it is now clear that the political environment in Taiwan will
never be the same. With this unprecedented action on March 18, the
movement succeeded in channeling mounting discontent with government
policies and elevated a nascent civic nationalism — and a desire among
young Taiwanese to fight for what they believe in — to a point of no
return. As the movement’s leadership vowed in front of tens of thousands
of supporters as they vacated the legislature on April 10, the occupation
has ended, but the battle goes on.

And it has. Although the trigger for the Sunflower Movement was the
Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA) and the manner in which the
pact had been handled since its inception, the activists were (and are
still) mobilizing for something that is much more fundamental. Their focus
is government accountability in all matters pertaining to public policy
and, increasingly, the government’s less-than-transparent dealings with
authoritarian China. The snowballing movement — or rather, the
constellation of movements that has flowered over the months — now targets
a variety of interconnected issues ranging from lack of government
oversight to the unholy nexus of high-level officials and big business,
unsafe nuclear power plants to inappropriate law enforcement decisions.

After years of seeming disinterest in politics, something has shifted
among Taiwan’s youth. Having despaired in an administrative system that
arguably no longer seems to work, the activists have shown unprecedented
determination. They will simply not go away. It is this resilience,
accompanied by signs of a slow escalation and the youths’ highly efficient
use of new media, that worries the authorities. Unwilling to back down,
the Ma government has hardened its position and is now embarking on a
campaign whose effects on Taiwan’s already highly imperfect democracy
could be disastrous. In fact, in a matter of weeks, the quality of the
nation’s democracy has arguably deteriorated, though unlike what the
government would argue, the cause of that erosion was not the
“undemocratic” occupation of streets and government buildings by
activists, but rather the government’s response to the challenge and its
indifference in the past year when protesters limited themselves to what
the administration regards as acceptable activism.

The source of the problem lies with the paternalistic nature of President
Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration, whose behavior since
the beginning of the crisis has served as a stark reminder that the
party’s authoritarian tendencies did not completely disappear with
democratization. Ma, who serves as KMT chairman, and his small circle of
appointed officials cannot countenance dissent within the party (which
certainly exists) and seem unable to admit failure. They are always right,
and whenever opposition to their policies arises, it is never because the
policies are flawed, but rather because the public hasn’t been “educated”
enough. That reflex has now reached Orwellian proportions, with criticism
of government policy automatically being treated as lies and
disinformation, even when the critics are respected academics from the
nation’s top institutions, or former special advisers to President Ma. To
further discredit its critics, the administration often claims that the
activists are “irrational,” “violent,” and that their actions are
undermining stability and harmony within society — language that is
usually heard in authoritarian China.

Through this approach, the Ma administration has sought to downplay the
size, reach, and heterogeneity of its opponents, which it wants to be
regarded as a small group of malcontents with nothing better to do than to
sow chaos within society and inconvenience local residents with protest
actions.

While a segment of society and ideologically aligned media have been
receptive to this government propaganda, the Ma administration is aware
that it is nevertheless on the brink of losing the war for hearts and
minds, mostly because it has failed to harness the powers of new media, a
natural territory for the young activists. The government has slowly come
to realize that social media are the new battleground, where the
propaganda war is waged, and where social movements organize and get their
Information.

To counter this, the KMT <http://news.ltn.com.tw/news/focus/paper/774991>
and the Executive Yuan (EY) have both announced they will soon establish
“new media” units 
<http://udn.com/NEWS/BREAKINGNEWS/BREAKINGNEWS1/8643219.shtml>to counter
“disinformation” circulating on the Internet and provide “correct”
government information using the social networks that served as the
principal means of communication for the Sunflower Movement. The unit
under the EY will reportedly fall directly under Premier Jiang Yi-huah. Ma
and Jiang said that they would hire tech-savvy youth to facilitate the
operations of their “new media” units, whose raison d’être bears striking
similarities with similar units in China, which have been strengthened
under President Xi Jinping in his campaign
<http://www.china.org.cn/china/2014-04/19/content_32149455.htm> against
the dissemination of “rumors” on the Internet. Officials have reportedly
also been instructed to roam the Internet and rectify “wrong” information
whenever they encounter it. The parallels with China’s use of “fifty cent
party” — paid Internet commentators who are relied upon by the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) to counter dissent and spread the “correct” line —
are hard to miss.

Recent chatter among Taiwanese activists also alleges that the
above-mentioned EY and KMT units could seek to spread disinformation on
the Internet to confuse civic groups, such as by instructing them to
gather at sham protests.

Meanwhile, although the National Police Agency (NPA) has yet to officially
comment on the matter, leaked documents seen by this author have led to
allegations that police officers are being instructed to engage in similar
online interventions and to do so while passing off as “ordinary
citizens.” Such claims would be supported by recent incidents where images
depicting improper police action during protests — including photographic
evidence of a pregnant woman being hit by water cannons — were deleted by
Facebook following repeated complaints of their impropriety. We can easily
guess the likely origin of those complaints. During the Sunflower
Movement’s occupation of the legislature, attempts to post links to
articles describing disproportionate use of force by the police on
platforms like Wikipedia were repeatedly blocked by individuals who, as it
was later established, had ties to pro-government and pro-Beijing media.
(In a related incident, Taiwanese activists discovered that a fan page on
Facebook set up to support police officers who had come under severe
criticism, had received tens of thousands of “likes” from zombie computers
based in Russia.)

Those developments occur against the background of sporadic attacks on
freedom of expression. In an incident last week, city government officials
ordered vendors in New Taipei City to take down
<http://news.ltn.com.tw/news/local/paper/774000> anti-nuclear banners from
their stalls, claiming that the presence of political slogans in a
business zone was improper. Furthermore, on several occasions during
protests in recent weeks, journalists and photographers who clearly
displayed their press credentials were forced out of public areas by
police officers, in clear violation of press freedoms.

Besides waging war on information, the government is also adopting law
enforcement measures that have drawn severe criticism from within society
and among rights activists. The Ministry of the Interior announced
<http://newtalk.tw/mobile/news_in.php?id=46832> on April 30 that it would
empower police to use “preemptive detention” against activists who have
been identified as “repeat offenders.” While such laws already exist, and
justifiably so, to restrict the movement of known pedophiles and other
types of criminals, the provisions have now been expanded to cover a wide
variety of crimes including “endangering public safety,” “hijacking,” and
“preventing official business.” The open-ended definition of such
infractions, which have already been invoked against protesters in recent
months, will facilitate the application of preemptive detention to counter
activities that under normal circumstances would constitute lawful
protesting. More importantly, it will make it possible for the
authorities, presumably after they receive permission from a judge, to
isolate and detain potential leaders before they can organize or
participate in protests.

The potential for abuse should be clearly apparent, if only because it
empowers the authorities to act on an individual’s perceived intent alone.
Conceivably, the targets of such measures would be the same young leaders,
people like Chen Wei-tin and Lin Fei-fan, who outwitted the authorities
and established themselves as credible — and appealing — opponents of the
government.

Meanwhile, Ma, who is perhaps most threatened by a possible split within
his party, has sought to consolidate his power by using the tactics of
autocrats by keeping his potential opponents close and diminishing the
size of his winning coalition, or what political scientists Bruce Bueno de
Mesquita and Alastair Smith refer to as the “essentials.” This Ma did on
April 30, with the announcement
<http://www.setnews.net/News.aspx?PageGroupID=1&NewsID=21692&PageType=2>
that he had appointed Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin, New Taipei City Mayor
Eric Chu and Taichung Mayor Jason Hu — all of whom had at some point or
another in recent weeks occasionally expressed different views from the
administration on how to resolve the political crisis — as KMT vice
chairmen. By doing so, Ma co-opted potential critics within the party,
which he himself admitted had been made “stronger” as a result, and
probably ensured that he can withstand pressure from within the ranks to
step down as party chairman, an outcome that this author had seen as
highly likely.

The same day, Ma announced that one-third of KMT Central Committee members
(presumably those whose support for Ma wasn’t rock solid) were being
slashed. Both were classic moves meant to strengthen the leader’s power
and ensure his total grip on the executive and legislative branches of the
government. KMT legislators have been repeatedly reminded that failure to
vote along the party line at the legislature will result in expulsion from
the party.

Ma’s machinations send a worrying signal that he does not intend to budge
and that he will likely continue to push for expedited policies, such as
passage of an experimental free-trade zone, which is being pushed through
at the legislature in a way that would look very familiar to those who
were following the CSSTA when it was on the legislative floor earlier this
year. With no side showing signs that it intends to back down, the stage
is being set for escalation and a possible showdown. Based on the policies
passed this week, it looks like the government intends to respond to that
challenge with a major propaganda campaign backed by a strengthened
security apparatus.

J Michael Cole is a Taipei-based analyst and writer. Michael is a CPI blog
Regular Contributor and Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the China Policy
Institute. Image by J. Michael Cole.

J. Michael Cole (寇謐將)Senior Non-Resident Fellow, China Policy Institute -
University of Nottingham, UK
Associate researcher, French Centre for Research on Contemporary China
(CEFC)
Correspondent, IHS Jane's Defence Weekly, Jane's Intelligence Review, IDR
Columnist, The DiplomatCELL 0911104013
Twitter @JMichaelCole1
Web site: http://http://fareasternpotato.blogspot.tw/