The question is whether she can be their trailblazer, too. As one of 10 independent swing votes in the new legislature, which is divided between the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of President Chen Shui-bian and the opposition Kuomintang (KMT), she will have an outsize influence on the DPP agenda. In fact, many analysts say she holds the key to President Chen’s political future: if he continues to be stymied by the legislature even after gaining a plurality of seats in the Dec. 1 polls, his reputation for ineffectualness could doom his chances of re-election in 2004. That and her vast public appeal mean Sisy Chen will have a great deal to say about where Taiwan goes from here.
Like many ordinary Taiwanese, she would most like to push the island toward closer economic ties with the mainland. Nearly 70 percent of Taiwan’s high-tech manufacturing has already moved to China, devastating the island’s economy. For years Taiwan’s government has resisted the trend by restricting investment in the mainland, fearing that economic dependence would make Taiwan vulnerable to Beijing. Some of those restrictions have been lifted recently, but business leaders argue that more drastic measures are needed, including establishing once taboo direct transportation links to the mainland.
While refusing to resume talks with Taiwan until the island accepts the “one China” principle, Beijing continues to encourage greater Taiwanese investment. “There is a very strong belief among some people here that if China increases its economic relations with Taiwan, it will agree to reunify,” says Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University and a prominent mainland commentator on cross-Strait relations. That may help explain China’s muted reaction to the Taiwanese elections, in which the pro-independence DPP trounced the KMT. (A limpid headline in the state-run English-language China Daily summed up the official view: victory unlikely to worsen relations.) With the DPP lacking a clear majority and thus forced to negotiate with pro-business independents like Sisy Chen, the logic goes, the ruling party will be forced to rethink its opposition to closer ties to the mainland.
At the same time, not everyone believes that economic openness has to translate into political obedience. “Up until now, history has not given us any examples from other countries that show that nation-al reunification resulted from closer economic relations,” says Tsinghua University’s Yan. “Money is one thing, independence another.” Similarly, Sisy Chen argues that companies that move their production facilities to the mainland will maintain headquarters in Taiwan. “They still want their children to grow up here,” she says of local executives. Her point is that the island will be able to resist reunification only if its economy is allowed to seek out new sources of strength. “It takes 100 years to really develop a sophisticated democracy, but we’ve only had a decade,” she says. “We need more time, and the only way is to find a new role in the greater China economy.”
Her political clout could thus work more to President Chen’s advantage than to Beijing’s. In a recent poll of 500 executives by the Taiwanese version of BusinessWeek, she was the top choice to set China policy. With her support, he might finally be able to win over the influential business community, which has thus far been unimpressed with his handling of the economy. That would give him the credibility to survive as more than the transitional figure Beijing had hoped he would be. And perhaps give Sisy Chen yet another role: kingmaker.
