Taiwan’s New Era Looks a Lot Like Old One

Taiwan’s new president, Chen Shui-bian, may have been elected as a reformer, but he isn’t bringing a fresh broom to Washington.

In fact, it turns out that Chen is going to do business here the same way his predecessor, Lee Teng-hui, did: by having his friends and financial backers pay large sums of money to a Washington lobbying firm.

In fact, backers of Chen--the first president elected from the Democratic Progressive Party, which long has supported Taiwan’s independence from China--will employ the very same Washington lobbying firm as did the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), which ruled Taiwan for half a century.

Documents filed here last week show that an entity vaguely called the Taiwan Study Institute will pay $2 million over the coming year to Cassidy & Associates, a branch of Shandwick International.

Cassidy, a firm made up largely of former government officials, earns a tidy profit by lunching and chatting up people on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch; its other foreign clients include Saudi Arabia and Gabon.

And what exactly is the “Taiwan Study Institute”? Its leading figure is Lin Chen-yi, a Taiwan banker whom Chen has known since law school, who has served as one of Chen’s and the DPP’s leading donors and who is now one of Chen’s main advisors.

The $2-million lobbying contract “has nothing to do with politics, nor is it related to President Chen or his administration,” Lin insisted in Taiwan last Friday.

That’s odd, because politics is Cassidy’s raison d’etre. Soon after the firm was first retained for $1.5 million a year by Lee Teng-hui’s associates in 1994, it lobbied hard, and ultimately successfully, to win Lee a visa for an unprecedented trip to the United States.

At the time, members of the DPP, then the leading opposition party, attacked the Cassidy contract as an example of how the KMT used its financial clout to twist Taiwan’s foreign policy for its own purposes.

During Chen’s campaign for Taiwan’s presidency, he promised he would change the way the government had operated under the KMT. His overall aim, he told me last January, was “to reduce the influence of money” on Taiwan’s political life.

The interesting question is why Chen seems to have been persuaded that Cassidy’s work was irreplaceable. What, exactly, does the firm do for Taiwan? After all, Taiwan already has its own unofficial embassy in Washington, called the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office.

Public relations? Lin claimed last week that Cassidy will help inform Americans about Taiwan’s democratization. But Taiwan’s diplomats in the United States have more than enough phones, faxes and copying machines to do that work themselves.

Lobbying for legislation? By one theory, Cassidy plays bad cop to TECRO’s good cop. If Taiwan’s diplomats were to work Capitol Hill or the press too assiduously, the State Department would rebuke them. So Cassidy does the job.

Maybe so, but one also has to wonder if this work is worth $2 million a year.

Lobbyists’ Influence Seen as ‘Overstated’

The main legislation concerning Taiwan on Capitol Hill is called the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act, which would strengthen U.S. defense links to Taiwan.

When that bill passed the House a few months ago, the most active organization was not Cassidy but a nonprofit grass-roots group called the Formosan Assn. for Public Affairs, which represents 500,000 Taiwanese Americans--many of them in Los Angeles.

“A lot of the supposed influence of lobbyists on Capitol Hill tends to be overstated,” observed one congressional staff member who has worked on the Taiwan legislation.

Cassidy’s most important function may lie elsewhere. Earlier this year, one member of Lee Teng-hui’s government explained the contract to me this way:

“The real purpose is to collect accurate political intelligence about what’s happening in Washington. Lee Teng-hui didn’t trust the reports of TECRO and his own foreign ministry. At $4.5 million [over three years], it was a bargain.”

Taiwan’s new president has probably decided to perpetuate this deal at the suggestion of Lee. Since the March election, Chen has made courtly public visits to pay homage to his predecessor, and the two men have engaged in some private meetings too.

In fact, after the election, there was speculation that Cassidy would just keep working for Lee and his allies, and they would have passed on whatever they learned to Taiwan’s new president. But that would have looked like too cozy an arrangement between the KMT’s ex-president and the DPP’s leader.

Elected to Change Government Culture

In the end, the renewal of Cassidy’s contract is important for what it tells us about Taiwan’s new president.

Chen Shui-bian has been trying to ease tensions with China, and for that endeavor he deserves credit. But he was also elected to change the way the Taiwan government worked.

To be sure, Chen is doing no more than China and Taiwan’s KMT have done before him. But Chen promised to be different. In his inaugural speech last month, Taiwan’s president proclaimed “the beginning of a new era.”

At least in Washington, Taiwan’s new era is beginning to look a lot like the old one.

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space every Wednesday.