In Taipei, Law School Grad Beats Public Health Alum

Popular incumbent and Harvard Law School graduate Ying-jeou Ma won the Taipei mayoral election decisively Saturday, positioning him to be a future contender for the Taiwanese presidency.

Before this election in Taiwan’s capital, polls indicated Ma would defeat challenger Ying-yuan Lee, a Harvard School of Public Health graduate.

Ma won 64 percent of the vote, a larger percentage than he did four years ago, when he narrowly defeated the current president and then-incumbent Shui-Bian Chen. Voter turnout was about 70 percent.

“This time, he cruised to victory,” said Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, a former director of the Harvard Asia Center.

According to Kirby, Ma’s success and popularity as mayor may catapult him into the presidency, just as Chen’s previous success as mayor contributed to his transition to the top national office.

“It’s not like being mayor of a major American city, which leads nowhere in American politics,” Kirby said. In Taiwan, “to be successful in that position automatically puts one in a national position in politics.”

In his acceptance speech, Ma said he had run a clean campaign against his fellow Harvard alum that was good for Taiwan’s democracy.

“My team has run one of the best campaigns in Taiwan’s electoral history,” he said. “In my campaign we did not buy votes, nor did we resort to violence. Furthermore, we did not attack our opponents through verbal abuse, scandal-mongering or falsifying information.”

Before the election, a number of experts confirmed Ma’s potential as a presidential candidate who could run with either of two parties, his own Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalist Party, and the ideologically similar People First Party (PFP).

Roderick MacFarquhar, Williams professor of history and political science, said before Saturday’s election that Ma’s victory would “put him in a good position to be a unified candidate” in the 2004 presidential election.

A significant factor in Ma’s political strength is his reputation for integrity and his public persona, according to Steven Goldstein, co-director of the Taiwan Studies Workshop at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.

“He projects this kind of movie-star quality,” Goldstein said before the election. “He also projects honesty.”

Ma said he realized the importance of honesty in politics while at Harvard.

“I learned a lot from my professors, to be a very honest person in doing research, following Harvard’s motto of veritas,” he said before the election. “This is something that helped not only shape my personal character but also my style in politics.”

But some Taiwanese political observers have reservations about Ma’s future success.

“If he is to go on and become an island-wide politician, he’s going to have to deal with senior people [in the parties],” Goldstein said.

The tension between Taiwan, which China regards as a rebel province, and the Beijing government did not emerge as an issue in the mayoral contest.

Kirby said debate about cross-strait relationship was noticeably absent from the race, which focused on city governance.

Ma’s campaign also remained impervious to Lee’s attempt to raise an often contentious ethnic issue. In Taiwan, those who are descendants from parents who fled a Maoist mainland China often come under question about their loyalties to the island.

Ma, whose parents left the mainland following Mao Zedong’s rise to power, said he would be on the side of the Taiwanese public and focus on Taipei’s problems, not the province’s.

“In a mature democracy, candidates should appeal to concrete policies instead of populism,” Ma said before the election.