Chen Shui-bian

* Re “Uncertain Era for Taiwan,” editorial, March 20: Your editorial about Taiwan’s President-elect Chen Shui-bian is accurate when it says that “Taiwan’s new president has compiled an impressive record since the early 1980s as a courageous opposition leader,” but unfair and inaccurate when it says “but he has little governing experience aside from serving one term as a determined, but ultimately unsuccessful, mayor of Taipei.” For a candidate from the 8-year-old Democratic Progressive Party to win the mayoral election in 1994 against the incumbent KMT supported by a 50-year-old political machine showed Chen’s impressive leadership skills and abilities; he also won because it was a three-way race. His reelection bid failed due in part to his war against organized crime bosses who supported the KMT candidate. Despite his 70% job approval, he could not overcome a two-way race.

Chen won the presidential election because again it was a three-way race. Chen also won because: 1) All factions of the DPP were firmly united behind him; 2) the endorsement of Dr. Lee Yuan-tseh, president of Academia Sinica and a 1986 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry; 3) voters’ negative reaction to a perceived united effort of a corrupt KMT with China’s threat of war against Taiwan.

EDWARD TANNG

Coordinator, Asian Theological Studies, San Francisco Theological

Seminary, So. Calif. at Claremont

* The result of the Taiwanese election will hopefully become the signal to China and its 1.3 billion people that any threats of force won’t work but only backfire. And I hope they learn democracy from their fellow Chinese in Taiwan. Only the democratization of the mainland can make reunification possible, and China can’t achieve reunification by military force.

Now it is China’s turn to change. Wake up, mainlanders!

PAT IHNJOON SONG

Granada Hills