Few elections have offered such last-minute drama as Taiwan’s presidential election in March, though whether the drama was a near tragedy, as followers of the victor believe, or a comedy, as his opponents maintain, was not immediately clear. The island is politically divided into two colour-coded blocs, along Byzantine lines. On one side is the ‘pan-Green camp’, comprising two pro-independence forces: the Democratic People’s Party (DPP), in control of the executive since 2000, and its recently created ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU). On the other is the ‘pan-Blue camp’, composed of the Kuomintang (KMT), which ruled the island for half a century after Chiang Kai-shek was driven from the mainland in 1949, and a breakaway faction of it, the People First Party, both identified with a tradition, now attenuated, claiming Taiwan to be the seat of the legitimate government of the whole of China, and still opposed to the idea of Taiwanese independence.
The day before the election, the DPP leader and presidential incumbent, Chen Shui-bian, standard-bearer of the Green camp, was waving regally to his supporters aboard a jeep in his home-town of Tainan. The street was narrow and crowded, and his welcome noisy, firecrackers – de rigueur on such occasions – exploding joyfully on all sides. Nothing untoward appeared to occur. Some hours later, however, it was announced that the candidate had been the victim of a pistol shot, which by a miracle had grazed rather than penetrated his abdomen, and that he was now recovering in hospital. Television showed images of a bullet-hole in the windscreen of the jeep, and Chen, standing and waving beatifically behind the driver, with a pinkish patch on the lower part of the front of his shirt.
All parties cancelled their final rallies, and the next day the Blue camp, which had started with a comfortable lead in the polls, lost by a whisker – some 30,000 votes, or 0.2 per cent of the vote. There was no question about the reason. Estimates differ of the scale of the sympathy vote that the ‘magic bullet’, as supporters of the Green camp would jubilantly come to call it, delivered to Chen, but it is quite clear that he would have been defeated without it. The Blue camp spoke of a put-up job and denounced it with increasing fury. Chen Shui-bian explained that his miraculous triumph showed that God had called him to lead the nation.
Subsequent evidence has left no doubt that Chen was indeed grazed by a home-made bullet, and that another ricocheted harmlessly into padding round the injured knee of his running mate, Annette Lu, sitting beside him on the jeep. But no assailant was noticed at the time, and none has been found since. The deeper mystery is not so much the identity of the marksman, who fired a primitive weapon at very close range, as the motive behind the shots. Who stood to benefit from such an attentat? Certainly not the pan-Blue camp, which, had it not been for the bullet, would have won the election. Could Chen have staged the whole affair himself, to hijack a victory otherwise out of reach? There are precedents for something like this: the fake ambush that Mitterrand is generally believed to have arranged against himself in 1959, when he was trying to refurbish his image as a doughty fighter against the Right, comes to mind. But Chen was wounded, however slightly, in a vulnerable part of his body: would any politician really take the risk of a friendly bullet going astray? A Green conspiracy seems scarcely less improbable than a Blue one.
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