As Taiwan Election Nears, Mainland Media Plays Down Politics

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/world/asia/taiwan-election-china-mainland.html

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BEIJING — On Saturday, voters in Taiwan will go to the polls to elect a new president. Interest in Communist-ruled China, which claims the island as its own territory, is great, yet one word is almost entirely missing from the voluminous debate over the event: “president.”

Instead, reports in the state-run news media and even in somewhat freer online discussion forums are riddled with euphemisms: “The big election.” “The leader’s election.” “The Taiwan-area election.”

Where the phrase “presidential election” does appear, it is invariably encased in quotation marks, as if it were not quite legitimate.

China and Taiwan have been estranged since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists retreated to the island after their defeat in the Chinese civil war in 1949 to Mao Zedong’s Communists. Beijing continues to regard Taiwan as a province awaiting reunification with the mainland and has threatened force should the island move toward formal independence.

Many Chinese state news outlets have largely focused on the mechanics of the Taiwan elections. (In addition to a president, Taiwan voters will be choosing a legislature. Or “legislature,” as the Chinese state news media renders it.)

An ironic, even patronizing, tone has also been featured: A widely circulated article in the overseas edition of People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, focused on the wackier side of Taiwan politics by featuring photographs of candidates dressed up as traditional gods, or spotted dogs, to attract attention from voters.

Many people in Taiwan suffer from “election syndrome,” the article said, an obsession with politics that can result in “sleeplessness, headaches, faintness, loss of appetite, anger and violent tendencies.”

While deploring that syndrome, the article also paradoxically deplored what it perceived as its decline, saying that it was evidence that voters in Taiwan had grown bored with the process.

Taiwan has held direct elections for its president for two decades now, and the system of choosing a leader has become both more pluralistic and more institutionalized.

“Taiwan hasn’t had a cold winter,” the People’s Daily article said. “But from the start, the election has been three feet deep in snow. The incidence of ‘election syndrome’ has declined to dust, but the air is full of a feeling that ‘I’m so bored I can’t even fall in love.’ ”

The paper noted that the elections this year featured a wide variety of candidates but hinted that this was a formula for instability.

“The era of ‘taking turns occupying the homestead’ is ending, and an era of ‘warlords chasing the deer’ is emerging,” it said. “What will Taiwan’s future be like?”

In the past, elections in Taiwan have mostly been a two-way race between the long-dominant Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, with its roots in the Chinese mainland, and the Democratic Progressive Party, which is largely based in native Taiwanese, young or pro-independence voters.

This time, the legislative elections, in particular, feature a colorful range of candidates, including a former student protest leader from China, a singer in a heavy-metal band, a man accused of involvement in organized crime and a Cambodian-born woman who hopes to be a voice for the many Southeast Asian migrants with spouses born in Taiwan.

The presidential candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party, Tsai Ing-wen, is widely favored to win. If she does, she will make history as the first woman to be elected leader in the Chinese-speaking world.

In an open letter, Chinese university students signaled their interest in events.

“We expect ever-improving development between the two sides after 2016 and that compatriots from both sides will join hands to work for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” the five state-sanctioned student groups from four major universities in Beijing and Nanjing declared in a joint statement.

All candidates should “maintain stability” in the China-Taiwan relationship, “support exchanges between the youth of both sides” and “support the prosperity of the youth and intergenerational justice,” they said.

In “Meet the Unknown Taiwan,” a heavily promoted series of articles on Sina.com, China’s biggest news portal, the focus was largely on lifestyle.

“Goodness Under Yangmingshan,” one of the five articles, showed retirees in Taipei volunteering for serious work in libraries and museums, instead of whiling away their time at mass square dances like their counterparts on the mainland.

The last report in the series, “The Village,” focuses on elderly people whose families arrived in Taiwan with the Kuomintang and live in special villages set up for military dependents.

A friendly, but largely patronizing, tone toward the island has become widespread in China as its economy and international influence have grown, said Mark Harrison, a specialist in Taiwan politics and culture at the University of Tasmania.

The Chinese state news media regularly portrays Taiwan as “charmingly rustic, so it could be appreciated, but also condescended to,” Mr. Harrison said.

“Taiwan is charming and holds onto Chinese values that we have lost in our thrusting upwards towards the commanding heights of global domination,” the narrative runs, he said. This approach avoids difficult questions of identity, he added.

Taiwan is a complicated society in which aboriginal peoples, the descendants of migrants from southern China, a prosperous history as a Japanese colony and the arrivals from mainland China after 1949 all serve as major influences. But the mainland news media rarely acknowledges that, Mr. Harrison said.

“It’s a complex ideological accommodation” in which the state media is “engaging closely,” he said, “especially in an era of mass Chinese tourism to Taiwan, but finding a way of making Taiwan ideologically safe. So all the really hard questions about identity and democracy are simply avoided.”