China TV Cautions Voters in Taiwan : Election: As Nationalists fight to retain legislative majority, pictures of military exercises on mainland send warning about independence.

The six television monitors in the newsroom of Taipei’s Super TV cable station were tuned earlier this week to rival evening news programs.

Five of them, showing Taiwanese channels, displayed the frantic campaign activities leading up to today’s parliamentary elections. The sixth, tuned to the national CCTV network in mainland China, showed a battery of launchers firing surface-to-air missiles somewhere along the Chinese coast.

Despite the strikingly different images, all the telecasts were really about the same thing.

Today’s elections will decide if Taiwan’s ruling Nationalist Party can maintain its majority in the Yuan, or parliament, against strong challenges from two opposition parties: the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party and the Nationalist-breakoff Chinese New Party.

The missile firings--one in a series of almost nightly broadcasts of military exercises featured recently on the mainland Chinese network--were a not-so-subtle warning to Taiwanese voters from the Communist leaders in Beijing.

As part of its “one China” policy, the Beijing regime still considers Taiwan part of its national territory. The mainland leadership has repeatedly warned of swift military retaliation if Taiwan swerves too far in the direction of independence.

In addition to being available via cable to most households here, the essence of the military broadcasts was featured the next day in all major newspapers.

The three main political parties here agree that the saber-rattling by mainland China will have an effect on today’s vote to fill the 164-seat Yuan.

A poll commissioned in late October by the United Daily News Group showed that 41% of respondents said they believed that the Chinese military maneuvers, which included mock landings on beaches very similar to those in Taiwan, would affect the elections.

The elections, the culmination of a decade of democratization, set the stage for Taiwan’s first-ever presidential election in March, 1996.

The most likely to benefit from Beijing’s military bluster is the upstart Chinese New Party, a mainly urban political grouping dominated by the offspring of “mainlanders” who fled to the island after the Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949.

The Chinese New Party favors negotiated reunification with the mainland. It warns that too much talk of independence will arouse the giant Communist neighbor, upon whom Taiwan is becoming increasingly economically dependent.

“I think they [the Chinese military maneuvers] have helped us get more votes,” said Jia Yi-ran, a Chinese New Party leader who serves on the Taipei City Council. “What mainland China is mostly concerned about is mainland policy. If an anti-independence party is elected, I think mainland China will be more relaxed.”

Chinese New Party leaders, campaigning on a motto of “No majority for any party in the legislature,” are hoping to win 20 to 25 seats, enough to play a spoiler’s role.

Most likely to suffer from the Chinese show of military muscle, which began in July with a series of missile tests off the northern coast of Taiwan, is the Democratic Progressive Party.

Founded as a pro-independence movement by dissidents who were jailed during four decades of martial law under the Nationalist regime, the Democratic Progressive Party has been unable to shake that rabidly pro-independence image despite shifting its election themes to corruption and mismanagement in the Nationalist government.

“We would like Taiwan to be independent,” said Ho Dwanfan, director of the Democratic Progressive Party’s labor and social movement division, “but that is not the main issue of this election. The main issue is to bring down the KMT.”

KMT stands for Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party’s name in Chinese.

Despite the mainland military scare, the Democratic Progressive Party still hopes to increase its membership in the Yuan from 50, won in 1992 elections, to more than 60.

Together with the seats won by the Chinese New Party and a handful of independents, this would deprive the Nationalists of the 83 seats they need for a nominal majority.

Although the Chinese New Party and the Democratic Progressives have few common positions, both agree that their first priority in a non-majority parliament would be to break up monopoly businesses controlled by the Nationalists.

However, in a news conference Thursday, Nationalist Party Secretary General Hsu Shui-teng predicted that the 101-year-old party, founded on the mainland by Sun Yat-sen, would win “at least 85 seats.”

Failure to elect a majority, Hsu warned, could “destabilize the government and paralyze the administration.”

On Friday, in an incident that only added to the current tensions, police said they arrested a “lunatic” bomber who tried to drive a truck loaded with explosives into the residence of Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui in central Taipei.

State television reported Friday night that Cheng Hua-chou, a 48-year-old ex-convict, was found to have 132 pounds of gunpowder in the truck.

President Lee was not home at the time of the incident, police reported.

They said there was no evidence that the episode was linked to the elections.