Stumping Far From Home in Taiwan

Elections for Taiwan’s national parliament Dec. 1 may be 9,000 miles away, but the distance isn’t deterring Taiwanese Americans in the Los Angeles area from participating in the process.

Droves of well-connected and well-heeled Taiwanese Americans, many from the San Gabriel Valley, have been leaving Los Angeles for Taipei since Sunday, planning to work for legislative candidates who belong to the Democratic Progressive Party of President Chen Shui-bian.

They view their participation as crucial to helping democracy flower. It was only five years ago, after decades of authoritarian rule, that Taiwan held its first fully democratic presidential election.

Li-Pei Wu, chairman and chief executive officer of General Bank in Los Angeles, called his three-week trip to Taiwan to work on the elections a labor of love for his native Taiwan.

Wencheng Lin, a Rosemead chemical engineer who has lived in the United States for 32 years, said his two-week pilgrimage to his native Miaoli County, two hours by bus from Taipei, is a “very personal and private trip” to offer an outside perspective to voters.

“As an American, I am very selfish,” Lin said. “A stable Taiwan is very important to the security of the United States.”

After decades of living in the United States and enjoying an American democracy, many Taiwanese Americans say they want the same for their island homeland of 23 million.

Many have worked for years here to foster democracy there with money, time and know-how. Last year, supporters of the Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate raised $1.2 million in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

A smaller number of local supporters of the Nationalist Party, also known as Kuomintang, are also involved in the election.

Los Angeles businessman Carl Huang, who was a member of the party’s Central Committee during the presidency of Lee Teng-hui, from 1996 to 2000, returned to Los Angeles on Tuesday after 10 days of surveying Taiwan’s politics. Huang said he may return to Taipei, depending on how the campaign, which officially began Monday, is going.

He lamented that local Nationalist Party supporters appear to be stepping aside in this election.

China and Taiwan have been divided since the Communists took over the mainland in 1949 and the Nationalists, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan and set up a government.

Sixteen months ago, Taiwan-born Chen won the presidency, loosening the Nationalist Party’s 50-year grip on Taiwan’s politics. But Nationalist holdovers in the unicameral Legislative Yuan from the 1998 elections have stymied Chen’s programs since he took office.

Chen “hasn’t been able to get his programs through because more than 50% of the Legislative Yuan are from the KMT [the Nationalist Party],” Wu said. That reality makes Dec. 1 elections all the more important, Wu and others said.

Wu, whose official title is senior advisor to the Taiwan president, left for Taipei on Monday with his wife.

He will give speeches at candidate functions, offer his perspective on the election on television and radio, and do anything else that may require his expertise, he said.

Wu does not draw a salary. Rather, the wealthy banker from Glendale spends his money to promote the island nation, a longtime U.S. ally that has been isolated diplomatically since the United States broke off relations and recognized the mainland as China in 1979. Next month, Wu said, he will donate $1 million to start a foundation to foster a better understanding of Taiwan in the United States.

Because of the lack of diplomatic relations with this country, when Chen made a three-day visit to the United States in May on his way back from a tour of Latin America, his visa for stopovers in New York and Texas was issued by the State Department for a private citizen.

Wendy Shyr, an Arcadia pharmacologist whose husband, Simon Lin, left for Taiwan on Sunday, said she will be staying up all night Nov. 30 to watch the election returns on a Taiwanese cable station in Los Angeles.

Taiwan is like “our mother,” she said.

Though she couldn’t accompany her husband on this trip because of their school-age children, her heart is very much in Taiwan, she said.

Shyr said she shares Chen’s dream of an independent Taiwan that would enjoy international respect.

“Taiwan can contribute a lot to the international society,” said Shyr.

Yet, U.S. foreign policy since 1979 has had the effect of isolating Taiwan, she said.

Chen’s supporters in Los Angeles hope for the emergence of a coalition of Chen’s party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union, whose spiritual leader is former President Lee Teng-hui.

Of the 225 seats in the Legislative Yuan, Chen’s party has 66 and the Nationalist Party has 112, according to Lawrence Liang, special assistant to Ambassador Jason Yuan, head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, Taiwan’s equivalent of a consulate.

If the coalition could garner 100 seats, there would be enough of the middle-of-the-roaders to get votes for the president’s initiatives, Lin said.

“For me, the process is important,” he said. “If the process is transparent, clean, and there is no scandal, I will be satisfied whatever the outcome.”