Taiwan’s Lu Has Her Issues

To her admirers, Taiwanese Vice President Annette Lu is Susan B. Anthony and Margaret Thatcher rolled into one -- a feminist pioneer and no-nonsense political scrapper who has broken the mold for women in one of East Asia’s most conservative societies.

To her critics, she’s an abrasive maverick whose blunt style and caustic attacks on mainland China -- whose leaders call her the “scum of the nation” -- have done Taiwan far more damage than good.

Either way, Lu stands today as one of Asia’s most unconventional political figures: a single woman who rose from modest means to reach Harvard Law School and survive years in jail and a bout with cancer on a remarkable journey to the heights of power.

“She’s tested the boundaries of the system,” said Hsu Hsin-liang, a onetime presidential hopeful and the former chairman of Lu’s Democratic Progressive Party. “She’s always controversial.”

During the course of an hourlong interview this month in the spacious vice presidential reception room, Lu insisted she has drawn political fire partly because she is a woman and partly because she refuses to compromise her principles under pressure.

She made it clear she wasn’t about to change her style now. “I’ve achieved what I have because I am what I am,” she said matter-of-factly.

Part of that is a strong ego. She receives visitors in a room dominated by a large portrait of herself, along with a framed poem about her Chinese name, Lu Hsiu-lien -- “Elegant Lotus.”

But Lu’s upfront public style is masked by a quiet voice and unimposing demeanor. At 59, Lu’s manner, coupled with her small stature and carefully groomed jet-black hair, gives her a matronly appearance.

After attending the August inauguration of Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte Frutos, she recalled that Cuban leader Fidel Castro initially mistook her for someone’s wife.

By all accounts, Lu is a workaholic. According to senior aides, she lives alone in a penthouse apartment just a few minutes’ drive from the presidential office complex in central Taipei. She begins her days early, ends them late and frequently calls weekend meetings.

“She’s always so enthusiastic about her work, there’s not much left for spare time,” said Deputy Information Minister Lee Cher-jean, who has accompanied Lu on overseas trips.

When Lu does have free time, she rarely goes out to press the flesh or relax with political cronies. Instead, she stays in, either writing or studying work-related papers. Lu’s former spokeswoman, Tsai Min-hua, said Lu rarely listens to music and delegates jobs such as shopping for clothes to subordinates.

*

Will He Pick Her Again?

As Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian gathers his forces to bid for a second four-year term next March, Lu’s political future remains an unanswered question: Will he pick her again?

Even though she has talked about stepping down, those who track the island’s political scene suspect that her words may have been more tactical posturing than a statement of genuine intent. Now she simply avoids the question, saying that Chen will pick his running mate after he wins the nomination at his party’s convention, scheduled for December.

“He’s the only one who has the answer,” Lu said coyly.

Recent opinion polls indicate that Chen trails his Nationalist Party opponent, Lien Chan, by 8 to 10 percentage points and fares even worse when paired with Lu as his running mate. Such numbers would be only one of several reasons to dump her, political observers here note.

Her aggressive style has made her unpopular within her party’s leadership and a frequent headache for Chen. “Her chances aren’t high for getting back on the ticket,” predicted Chin Heng-wei, a respected political commentator and radio talk-show host in Taipei.

Others disagree.

The rhetorical barbs Lu hurls at Beijing and her unabashed advocacy of Taiwanese independence have made her the darling of her party’s conservative base, made up of voters who despise the mainland government and reject the ambiguity that hangs over Taiwan’s status.

That ambiguity, underscored by Beijing’s claim that the island is a breakaway province of China that must be reunited with the mainland, has kept Taiwan largely isolated diplomatically since the 1970s. (The United States broke off relations with Taipei in 1979, when it formally recognized the Communist government in Beijing.) It also compels most of the island’s political leaders to carefully choose their words about Taiwan’s status to avoid further straining the tense relationship with Beijing.

“She’s got the [brass] to say things others wouldn’t dare,” said Robert Wen, a Taipei electronics company executive, who, like most businesspeople, believes her blunt talk is bad for Taiwan’s extensive trade ties with China.

But Beijing’s denunciations of her as a “lunatic” have merely added to her aura among the DPP’s hard-line faithful.

Former party leader Hsu cites other reasons to expect Chen to keep her on the ticket. He says it would be safer to have her on than off.

“She’s a troublemaker,” he said. “If he dumps her, she’ll cause trouble for him. I think Chen will have to keep her.”

Trouble has been Lu’s companion for much of her life.

Lu was born to a struggling middle-class family in Taoyuan County, south of Taipei. During her childhood, her father twice tried to sell her -- a common practice for parents of baby girls at the time. When negotiations failed, he invested considerable energy in priming her for school.

The effort paid off. She excelled in competitive exams, easily passed through a prestigious Taipei secondary school for girls and graduated first in her class at the law department of National Taiwan University. That performance won her a hefty scholarship to the University of Illinois and a front-row seat to the American political tumult and feminist awakening of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was a life-changing experience.

Upon her return to Taiwan, she quickly weighed in against efforts to limit slots for female students in higher education with a series of strongly argued essays that social scientists now cite as a beginning of the island’s feminist activism. Subsequent efforts to organize women’s groups and activities made her the target of stinging personal attacks from Taiwan’s political establishment.

“The reason I’ve come so far is that I’ve paid a very high price,” she said.

By the time she left for advanced studies at Harvard in the late 1970s, Lu had also drawn the attention of the government’s intelligence services -- a feared organization in the Nationalist-dominated one-party state that existed at the time. When she returned home in late 1978, it didn’t take long before she clashed with the authoritarian government.

She joined the budding democracy movement opposed to the Nationalist monopoly on power. In one of the seminal events of Taiwan’s transition from dictatorship to pluralistic democracy, she was arrested along with eight others after daring to celebrate International Human Rights Day in December 1979.

She was charged with sedition and eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison, where, she said, she was harassed and mentally tortured. Only after sustained pressure from Amnesty International and local activists was she released on medical parole, after 5 1/2 years, for treatment of thyroid cancer.

For all its horrors, the ordeal also contained Lu’s political salvation. Among those who defended her in court was a young, idealistic lawyer named Chen Shui-bian.

She retells the experience, speaking carefully and with a sense of pride. “At the time, no one thought we would come out of jail. Everyone thought we would die,” she said of herself and her codefendants. “Nobody would ever expect that after so many years, one of those defense lawyers and one of those jailed would get together and campaign for president and vice president of this country.

“So my encounter with Mr. Chen and the result -- it’s a beautiful story,” she added.

When Chen’s presidential campaign was launched in 1999, Lu, who by then had entered politics, was governor of electorally important Taoyuan County. As a well-known woman from the northern part of the island, she was viewed as the perfect candidate to run with Chen, who is from the south.

*

A Self-Made Woman

The same grit that saw Lu through her years in prison has stayed with her during her 3 1/2 years in the country’s second-highest office.

She calls it a miracle that her people elected a woman as vice president, claiming that it marked the first time in 5,000 years of Chinese history that voters had placed a woman in so high an office.

She is also quick to remind a visitor that Asia’s other female leaders -- women such as Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Indonesian leader Megawati Sukarnoputri -- rose to power by virtue of family connections and the legacies of fathers who were themselves powerful leaders.

“I am perhaps the only one in Asia who has achieved so much on my own merits, coming from a very average family,” she said.

Despite her reputation for hard-edged rhetoric, Lu spoke in soft, measured tones during the interview. But in a part of the world where straightforward language is rare, it is the blunt content of Lu’s comments that raises hackles.

While other Taiwanese politicians tiptoe around the ambiguities of Taiwan’s international status, Lu simply wades in. In a speech to an international gathering in Taipei this year, she labeled China’s increased military saber-rattling as “another kind of terrorism.”

Lu has labored -- sometimes with bizarre results -- to lift Taiwan out of its diplomatic isolation. Taiwan has formal ties with only 27 of the world’s 191 nations, and most of those are the product of checkbook diplomacy with poor African, Latin American and tiny Pacific island countries.

Last year, after making an unannounced dash to Jakarta to meet with the leaders of Indonesia -- which doesn’t recognize Taiwan -- Lu was kept at the airport for two hours, then shunted to the outer island of Bali before finally being allowed to return briefly to the capital two days later for talks with lower-level politicians.

“What entitles China to control me?” she fumed afterward. “Taiwan is not part of China.”

“She’s a firebrand,” said former U.S. Ambassador to China James R. Lilley, who knows Lu well.

“She drives certain people crazy because of what she does, but she feels if someone doesn’t stand up and say these kinds of things that Taiwan will just be flattened.”

Some women claim she has lost interest in the feminist cause during her years as vice president, but her office cited a series of initiatives she has supported. And Lu clearly believes her greatest contribution to women’s rights in Taiwan is simply the example of her own experience.

“Breaking the ceiling is more important,” she said. “Traditionally, no woman would have thought she ... would have many options, but since I was elected vice president, young girls say, ‘I want to be president.’ They feel they can do everything now. That’s a very significant breakthrough.”

*

Marshall was recently on assignment in Taipei. Special correspondent Tsai Ting-I contributed to this report.