It must have seemed tempting. The Chinese Nationalist Party’s presumptive presidential nominee speaks fluent English, while most Taiwanese nationalist candidates for the job don’t. So…why not just write an English requirement for the presidency into law, thereby ELIMINATING most Taiwanese nationalists from the political competition?
(Given the smaller pool of eligible candidates, the over-all quality of the final Taiwanese nationalist candidate would likely suffer as well. From the KMT’s point of view, a win-win proposal all around.)
A few days later though, the Chinese nationalists dropped the idea. It’s a pity the English papers didn’t give us too many of their comments as to why, however. Now, perhaps they abandoned it because it was undemocratic and limited the Taiwanese public’s right to choose. (I will not exclude that possibility.) Or perhaps there was another reason – one more rooted in long-term self-interest. Because surely someone at the Chinese Nationalist Party must have considered that one language requirement might someday beget another. And by that, I mean one for Taiwanese.
A Taiwanese requirement for the R.O.C. presidency would make at LEAST as much sense as an English requirement – 60% of Taiwanese speak it to one degree or another, for crying out loud. Enacting one would do to the Chinese Nationalists exactly what they so transparently tried to do to Taiwanese nationalists: Put them at a severe electoral disadvantage. Well, a Taiwanese requirement wouldn’t hurt all KMT members – just the dominant Mainlander faction that only speaks Mandarin. Still, it’s hard to imagine those fellas maintaining dominance over the party once the highest office of the land becomes closed to them, all nice and legal-like.
A language requirement for the presidency? If I were a Mainlander belonging to the KMT, that’s definitely one sleeping dog I’d prefer to let lie.
UPDATE (Apr 24/07): The View from Taiwan points out that that soon afterwards, Taiwanese nationalists tried to cater a law aimed specifically at Ma Ying-jeou, the probable KMT presidential candidate for 2008. Joe Hung at the China Post discusses this case as well.