Why Progressives Hate Ko Wen-je, a leading presidential candidate in the January election
A letter from Natalie Zemon Davis’s children; support Palestine; and book club on Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s THE BURU QUARTET
Dear all,
Thanks for all your kind replies to our newsletter last week. We’re so grateful to have you as readers.
Taiwan elects a new president in January. In spite of the high stakes, it’s been a somewhat sleepy election season—until this week.
Before Tuesday, the governing assumption was that the current Vice President, William Lai of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was sleepwalking into a victory. Lai’s competing against three candidates: Hou You-yi of the Kuomintang (KMT), Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), and Terry Gou (independent, the villainous CEO of Foxconn). Hou and Ko have both been polling around 21 percent, while Gou has been receiving eight percent. Since September, Lai has consistently been pulling more than 30 percent, even though his support has slipped.
Everybody knows that a united opposition would pose a real challenge to Lai. Most polls indicate that a majority of the population want change after Tsai Ing-wen’s eight-year hold on the presidency. A “Blue-White” alliance between the KMT (the Blues) and the TPP (the Whites) would possibly dislodge the DPP (the Greens). Nearly every conversation with politically-minded Taiwanese friends has begun with this question: do you think the Blues and the Whites are going to “get married”?
Readers, nobody thought these two would ever say yes. But then they did. And then (spoiler alert) they got cold feet. All this happened over the course of four days. On Tuesday, Hou and Ko announced a unity ticket. Yesterday, they announced they broke up.
From the get-go, everything about their marriage was convoluted. Who would get to be President—and who would agree to be “demoted” to VP? In a very confusing series of statements, the two parties agreed to decide the order of the ticket through a series of opinion polls. If you want a blow-by-blow, read the always essential Frozen Garlic, as well as the most recent post at Ketagalan Media and this series by Courtney Donovan Smith.
Even more strange was how the agreement got signed. Four old straight men—Hou, Ko, KMT Chairman Eric Chu, and Ma Ying Jeou, president of Taiwan from 2008 to 2016—entered into a room and talked for two hours. All four men asked their aides to leave the room. The mere fact that Ko and Ma agreed to enter into the same room was surreal: it’s well-known that they hate each other. Ko first burst onto the political scene as a critic of President Ma’s policies—he once likened Ma to the “greedy Gollum from the Lord of the Rings.” And now he was agreeing to a deal that would essentially fold his party into greedy Gollum’s.
Meanwhile, there was almost instantaneous blowback within Ko’s party. The media reported that his top aides broke down into tears upon hearing of the agreement. In an equally bizarre, awkward hour-and-a-half TV interview, Ko basically admitted that he had no idea what he was signing onto.
The past four days have sent the media into a frenzy. Who was going to emerge at the top of the ticket, Hou or Ko? With a Blue-White pairing on its way, was Lai now the underdog in the race?
And then it all fell apart on Saturday. Again, we’ll spare you the details because, honestly, we watched all three press conferences and still don’t totally understand the technical disagreements. We point you to the indispensable Frozen Garlic if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty. But basically, the Blue-White alliance is now off.
Our only response to all of these machinations? We quote the immortal Macbeth:
It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
What has become clear is that Ko—more than any other figure on the Taiwanese political scene—generates a unique, vociferous animus within progressive circles. They loathe Ko with intense ferocity. We asked a few friends to explain. One wrote: The thing I hate most is his contempt of Chen Chu. (Chen Chu is a legendary dissident whom we wrote about here. She was was incarcerated for six years and later became a mayor of Kaohsiung.) Ko portrayed her comically, using the word “fat,” after she helped him with a mayoral election in 2014. It shows he’s backstabbing, misogynist, arrogant. We asked another friend who works at a wrongful conviction NGO, “What are his worst moments? What are his redeeming qualities?” She replied, He has too many worst moments, it makes the word worst meaningless. She didn’t bother answering part two.
And yet another replied that Ko changes principles for the purpose of power: He is spineless; he is my definition of evil.
What accounts for this particular hatred?
First among the reasons is the sense of betrayal: Ko came to power in 2014 by riding the wave of the Sunflower Movement, the defining progressive movement of the past 10 years. That watershed moment, which blocked a free trade agreement with China, eviscerated Ma’s authority as president. Since then, Ko has slowly walked back many of his statements. He even said he would now support a potential free trade agreement with China. The agreement this Tuesday—negotiated in closed doors, brokered by Ma Ying-jeou—was the apotheosis of this assault on the Sunflower ethos.
Our friend, the astute journalist William Yang, observed that the dislike among progressives “runs parallel with the trajectory of his political transformation. Ever since he entered politics nine years ago, Ko has been moving more and more towards the right rather than towards the progressive side that people originally thought he represents.” By contrast, his competitor “has always been somewhat consistent.” Even though Hou was head of Taipei Police Department’s Criminal Investigation Division that led the investigation that led to the self-immolation of Deng Nan-jung in 1989, “Hou’s never tried to deny or whitewash whatever that he's done in the past.” On the other hand, William notes, “Ko has been almost like a chameleon; he's been changing his political colors and leanings every time. Very often it doesn't seem that there's a consistent political narrative and ideology that we can derive from him as a politician.”
But Albert and Michelle, you’ll say, flip-flopping is what many politicians do—what’s the big deal? What particularly galls us is his opportunism. Last year, soon after a killing in Tainan sparked a public outcry, he announced that he supported the death penalty. Last week Ko suggested that LGBTI students should be treated as having a mental or emotional disorder. As Yang put it, “Time and time again he puts out public statements that claim his medical expertise as a source of authority.”
Ko’s constant invocation of medical authority leads to one of the final reasons why we think Ko galls progressives: his unabashed, unapologetic, self-aggrandizing elitism. Ko often refers to his IQ score of 157, name-drops NTU, invalidates others by referring to the college they went to, and constantly challenges anyone who disagrees with him as being “unscientific”—as if only he has access to scientific knowledge and expertise. As we will explore in next week’s newsletter, progressive Taiwanese have increasingly come to see belief in Taiwanese “meritocracy” as a conservative remnant of Taiwanese authoritarian rule. For Taiwanese progressives, Ko is not only a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He’s also the shepherd who claims to be a faithful guardian of his flock—and decides without warning that he wants lamb mutton for dinner.
Links
On the Sunflower movement, the most important progressive moment in the past ten years: see Albert’s piece in Los Angeles Review of Books; Ian Rowen in Journal of Asian Studies; and the oral history archive at New Bloom.
Ko’s gaffes or offensive incidents are too many to list, but here are a few. (Many of these articles in Mandarin.)
Ko describes LGBTQI students as having a mental and emotional disorder
Ko calls legendary, formerly incarcerated dissident Chen Chu “fat” and backstabs her
Ko says high school students who drop out should be surveilled
He announced that he supports the death penalty, following a public outcry against a killing; seven years ago, he left his position ambiguous and even criticized legislators calling for the death penalty.
Michelle wrote a piece about Kathy Boudin's work organizing in prison. It was published in Forum in Women's and Gender Studies (婦研縱橫) and translated by Wenpei Lin. Thanks to Chen Chao-ju, who attended Boudin's memorial service in New York and asked Michelle to introduce her work to a Taiwanese audience.
Organizing is difficult anywhere, but in prison, there’s the added fact that you can’t use the word “organize.” You ask for permission; you create programs or you ask to “facilitate.” AIDS education in the 1980s was particularly touchy, Kathy Boudin writes, because it “requires talking about sex and drugs, both of which are illegal in prison, and corrections personnel did not want to acknowledge they both happen in prison.” The prison eventually allowed Boudin to allow HIV/AIDS educators to enter the prison; this was a major victory. As she puts it, “We wanted to create a community within the prison; we wanted to take care of our sisters who were dying in front of our eyes, and prevent others from getting sick. We, women prisoners, drove this process.”
Natalie Zemon Davis’s children respond to the New York Times obituary
We are honored to share a response from Natalie Zemon Davis’s children, who wrote a letter in reply to the New York Times obituary of their mother. The Times didn’t publish their letter, but we wanted to share it. Her two daughters are readers of this newsletter and we adore them:
Dear editors,
Thank you for Elsa Dixler's excellent obituary on our mother, the social historian Natalie Zemon Davis (23 October 2023). We are grateful and moved. We write to illuminate something profound about our parents’ marriage and their values that was mischaracterized, however, in the piece.
“Her career, like those of most academic women of her generation, was shaped in part, and stalled, by her husband’s,” Dixler writes, referring to the impact of our father Chandler Davis’s imprisonment and blacklisting for contempt; he had taken the First Amendment when brought in for questioning by the House on Un-American Activities. In fact, across the span of their entire marriage, Natalie believed in our father’s choice to take the First; she wasn’t “stalled” by it. Chan’s arrest came, not because he was distributing “Communist literature,” but because he’d paid for mimeographed copies for a 1952 pamphlet that our mother wrote with Elizabeth Douvan, “Operation Mind: A Brief Documentary Account of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. And Why It Matters Now.” “Operation Mind” critiqued HUAC for creating a climate of fear with regards to freedom of speech; alas, it makes resonant reading today. Theirs was a stunningly atypical marriage in the 1950s U.S.; Dad’s whole case was one more way that they collaborated on building a life and an ethic together.
Unlike many “academic women of her generation,” Natalie’s husband was a feminist partner when that wasn’t a “thing,” who contributed hugely to the work of the home—a loving and present dad for us kids before and after his six months in prison and his blacklisting and for the rest of his life. Chan also had a keen analytic mind and reveled in his partner’s intellect and her revolutionary work as a historian: he proofread and discussed every aspect of Natalie’s work with her until he died last year. Our parents were engaged in a lifelong conversation and a loving and intellectually fertile marriage.
We hope their marriage can serve as a touchstone for what is possible between committed partners, even when the contemporary norms speak otherwise about what is possible.
Again, thanks to Elsa Dixler and to the Times for this otherwise marvelous obituary.
Sincerely,
Aaron Davis, Hannah Davis Taïeb, and Simone Weil Davis
Miao Poya, one of the most charismatic legislators in Taiwan, period
We thought November was going to be a more relaxed month—but the past two weeks have turned out to be equally hectic. For the record, not all politicians in Taiwan are terrible. We’ve found one person inspiring and incredibly charismatic: Miao Poya, a legislative candidate in the district where we live. Currently a Taipei city council member, she’s one of the first openly lesbian Taiwanese politicians. Here she is at one of her election events, which doubled as a live podcast taping. (She co-hosts a popular podcast.) You can see an interview with Emily Wu here.
Support Palestine
Thanks to our reader and friend Omar Amir, who connected us to Health for Palestine. Its co-founder Bram Wispelwey wrote, “We lost one of our beloved community health workers, Rasmi, to a sniper bullet last Sunday in Balata refugee camp, and my medical students in Gaza are living through a constant nightmare, losing friends and loved ones daily.”
Bram shared a photo of Rasmi (on the right):
Colleague Karameh Hawash Kuemmerle remembers Rasmi:
My dear friend Rasmi was one of the kindest, most gentle, and giving of people … As a diabetic himself, he understood how to offer compassionate care. Rasmi was the sole caretaker of his father who had end stage renal failure. He did it with a lot of love.
He was tireless in supporting his patients. One elderly man in particular I recall had a severe neurological disease and needed a certain kind of medicine to improve his symptoms. The medicine was not available. Undaunted, Rasmi we went on a hunt to look for it and found a small pharmacy with two boxes of the medicine. He then paid for them and asked detailed questions about how to administer it. Rasmi was like that. Generous with everything he had. He sat on the floor with the patients in the camp, played with the kids, joked with Down Syndrome patients, and cheered up everyone around him. He was very loved.
To be with Rasmi meant having a good time. He had an infectious smile and a great sense of humor. Children, adults, and elderly loved him. The world today lost a big heart and a hero to many.
Bram writes that two places to donate right now are the UNRWA, which is positioned within Gaza right now, and the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
Book Club: Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind
We'll be talking about Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind, the first in his tetralogy The Buru Quartet. (Thank you, Ashish Valentine, for this recommendation.) It’s a riveting account of anticolonial revolutionary movements in Indonesia. Toer wrote it while imprisoned at Buru Island.
Because of Thanksgiving, we're holding book club on Friday, Dec. 1 at 6 PM EST / Saturday, Dec. 2 at 7 AM Taiwan time. (Note the time change due to daylight savings.) Email us for the Zoom link.
"Meanwhile, there was almost instantaneous blowback within Ko’s party. The media reported that his top aides broke down into tears upon hearing of the agreement. In an equally bizarre, awkward hour-and-a-half TV interview, Ko basically admitted that he had no idea what he was signing onto."
This is so funny XD
Which candidate does Progressives support? Your essay is refreshing to hear because I thought most young people /progressives support Ko.