TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — Some people love to follow sports, such as the ongoing World Cup. I prefer to follow politics. In sports, the champion gets a trophy, a ring, some lucrative endorsement deals. In politics, the champion gets a standing army.
Taiwan politics has "Game of Thrones" levels of intrigue, plots, ambitious scheming, shifting alliances, betrayal, money, power, sex and violence. Alas, there are no dragons, but there is the added drama of a huge, hostile empire across the Taiwan Strait meddling, harassing, and threatening invasion.
Taiwan politics is fun, with colorful and exciting election campaigns. It also serves the solemn purpose of choosing who rules us.
Election cycles usually begin with lots of speculation on who will run for what office, and often backroom horsetrading between different potential candidates, interests, and factions. If agreement can’t be reached between potential candidates, one of two things will happen: Either it will go to a primary, or the party leader and the election committee will simply choose the candidate.
In this election cycle, both Kuomintang (KMT) Chair Eric Chu (朱立倫) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chair Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) were both notably heavy-handed in directly choosing the main candidates, and both came under much criticism for being “undemocratic.” In the past, and in this election for less key candidates, a primary was the norm.
These days, primaries are done by telephone polling using multiple external polling firms to avoid the risk or impression of bias. Sometimes the numbers are weighted to produce desired outcomes, such as the KMT giving bonus weight to younger candidates.
Once the primaries are complete, the next step is for the party leaders to mollify the losers, so they don’t bolt the party and join another one, or run as an independent. This happened in several cases this cycle, including on the KMT side in Miaoli and on the DPP side in Hsinchu.
Off to the races
Then we’re off to the races! The fun side comes out as campaigning gets underway.
Campaigning initially gets off to a slow start, with candidates generally not spending too much money early on. Then, a few months prior to the election, the ballot number ceremony happens.
Candidates show up, often with a group of supporters and sometimes dressed in outrageous costumes to draw the eye of the press, and take turns with the other candidates to draw their number. Then they come out and announce their number, almost always with a pithy slogan based on the number, which Sinitic languages are well suited for, unlike English.
Now the big spending begins and banners go up with their name and ballot number seemingly everywhere there is space. Mountains of tissue paper packets, water bottles, fans, and other knick-knacks valued under the legal limit of NT$30 — and in this cycle the addition of facemasks — are distributed bearing the candidate’s usually heavily Photoshopped face.
An army of sound trucks roam the streets with loudspeakers blaring a slogan or two, the candidate’s name and ballot number, sometimes some “borrowed” copyrighted music and invariably ending by begging “please! please! (vote for me).' When multiple sound trucks get stuck in traffic near each other, it sounds like cats fighting.
Candidates on the trail
Decked out in campaign vests bearing their name and number, candidates roam the streets, stand on street corners and visit markets. At markets, vendors who like the candidate may gift a pineapple, daikon radish or garlic.
These vegetable gifts to favored candidates carry meaning and are intended to bring good fortune, as they are all homonyms of other words in Taiwanese Hokkien. Pineapple (ong lai) is a homonym for "prosperity comes," daikon radish (tsai tao) for “good luck” and even better garlic (suan) for “chosen.”
Candidates also love to stand on little platforms on street corners or ride on raised truck platforms and wave to passersby. If a candidate is fortunate, they will be joined on the truck by a “hen.”
Taiwanese political terminology is colorful and fun. A “hen” is a higher-level candidate or politician who uses their star power to corral down-ticket “chicks” to victory, which I find an utterly adorable way to describe this.
Interestingly, a common way of saying this is that the hen “stumps” (樁) for the chicks. I suspect that “stump” was borrowed from American political terminology, but if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know.
Taiwan's entertaining rallies
As election day draws near, the big rallies begin. Tour buses pour in, vendors set up if the candidate is a big one and sell political merch and pennants are often handed out for them to wave excitedly at key moments during the rally.
A good rally is entertaining and won’t just include politicians speaking, but will often feature singalongs and performers such as dancers or acrobats at the biggest of rallies. There is a lot of call-and-response interaction going on between the speaker and the crowd, often featuring chants of “frozen garlic.”
In Taiwanese “to get elected” is pronounced “dong suan.” Using the Mandarin pronunciation for those characters doesn’t sound as forceful and fun, and so using a bit of cheeky humor they substitute the words for “frozen garlic” because that is pronounced “dong suan” in Mandarin. It is also the source of the name for an excellent Taiwan politics blog run by Academia Sinica scholar Nathan Batto.
As campaigning intensifies, so does the endless press speculation, online misinformation and tons of memes both vicious and hilarious. Taiwanese political humor is top-notch, but often hard to translate into English.
Voting day and sutras
Finally, voting day comes. Voters get sheets with a photo and basic information about the candidates, then cast their ballots by marking circles with a sort of peace sign symbol if it were missing the right leg part of it.
After voting ends, ballot boxes are immediately sealed and vote counting commences. The vote-counting process is characterized the ballots being raised high one-by-one in front of interested citizens and the vote announced, for example: “A vote for number 2, candidate name” and "a vote for number 3, candidate name.”
The sound of the votes being called out was neatly described by American Taiwan scholar Kharis Templeman — who incidentally runs the other excellent Taiwan politics blog — as akin to “sutras being chanted.” The process is very transparent, and the results are typically known within four or five hours.
Templeman, who was part of a team of American observers, noted that some of members of the delegation were moved to tears. Considering the chaos of modern American elections, that is understandable.
On the evening of the election, crowds will gather at major candidates’ campaign headquarters, and will watch the election results on giant video screens. The crowd will cheer when their party pulls ahead or a race is called for one of their candidates, or go silent when the opposite happens.
Then, when time comes for the race of the candidate they support to be called, the crowd quiets as their candidate either declares victory, or concedes.
Depending on which it is, the crowd will either be in a very festive, celebratory mood, or will dejectedly leave the site, some with tears in their eyes. There is a deep passion here for democracy, and it is beautiful to behold.
