Hualien County and vote-buying

In an interview with Formosa TV on Saturday last week, former Financial Times Taiwan correspondent Kathrin Hille talked about the state of democracy where she lives in rural Hualien County. She phrased it bluntly: “All the votes are paid for.”

Neighbors would even drop by and put cash on the table to show “how much each vote was worth that year,” Hille said.

Courtney Donovan Smith, Taipei Times staff columnist and former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Taichung, has written (“Donovan’s Deep Dives: Witnessing the early era of the KMT’s patronage factions,” page 12, April 2) about witnessing the wads of cash used by local factions to buy votes while working in Changhua in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The political structures of Changhua and Hualien are different. Vote-buying in Changhua rose out of vicious competition between local factions under one-party authoritarian rule. With the rise of the opposition movement, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and greater voter autonomy and transparency, Changhua, along with most other parts of Taiwan, has long since moved beyond cash-for-votes politics.

Unfortunately, despite decades of democratic development and crackdowns on electoral bribery by prosecutors and police, the practice persists in some peripheral areas such as Hualien, where political parties have long-entrenched networks. To understand why Hualien remains stuck in the past, the clientalist system must be examined.

Hualien’s economy and local livelihoods are highly dependent on government budgets, agricultural subsidies and major infrastructure projects. Some Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) political families have styled themselves as monopoly holders and sole distributors of those resources. Faced with economic insecurity and anxiety over the region’s prospects, voters can easily become cornered into feeling that without voting for the incumbent faction, welfare and development projects could be cut off.

Politicians provide cash, jobs, subsidies, infrastructure or services, while voters repay them with votes, political mobilization, or loyalty. In this way, clientelism helps to leverage structural underdevelopment as a source of long-term political power. It is the reason that democracy remains constrained in Hualien and vote-buying has become entrenched at the ground level.

KMT Hualien County commissioner candidate Candy Yu (游淑貞) strongly rejected Hille’s claims and even threatened legal action. Her reaction reflects the extent to which the controversy has damaged the legitimacy of the local governing camp. As the successor apparent to KMT caucus whip Fu Kun-chi’s (傅?萁) long-standing political dynasty, Yu’s anxiety is understandable: The issue threatens to entangle the Fu faction’s battle to hold onto the county commissioner seat.

The Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office on Sunday last week launched an investigation and law enforcement authorities are certain to step up their preparations ahead of November’s elections to closely monitor the flow of funds to grassroots campaign operatives.

Traditional forms of electoral bribery can be difficult to prosecute, because their discretion makes it challenging to obtain concrete evidence.

However, judicial scrutiny and public attention can still have a valuable deterrent effect, helping the three-way race between Yu and the independent candidates Chang Chun (張峻) and Wei Chia-hsien (魏嘉賢) — both former KMT members — to take place under fairer terms.

Innocence is usually not proven by threatening to file a lawsuit. It must be demonstrated by casting off the shadow of vote-buying and breaking the system of clientelism. The testimony of foreign journalists serves as a reminder to the people of Taiwan: while we might present ourselves as a democracy founded on freedom, the picture is not always so rosy for voters in the peripheries.

In addition to thorough investigations and enforcement, Hualien voters need to use their ballots to break free from decades of political constraints and give the county a clean future.