Taiwan presidential candidates make final fought vote Saturday

Each political party accuses the other of embracing policies that threaten the country's future. Political gridlock hampers governing. Leaders trade insults.
Sound like U.S. politics? Actually, national politics on this side of the Pacific are tame compared with the fiery and complex democracy in Taiwan, where a contentious presidential campaign wraps up Saturday. The stakes are potentially high, and the results are being closely watched in Silicon Valley, which relies on the island as a crucial link in the global supply chain for consumer electronics.
Thousands of Bay Area Taiwanese-Americans are boarding planes to Taipei to join the political fray -- so great is the outpouring that it's now virtually impossible to get a seat on a flight from California to Taipei. Ballots can be cast by Taiwanese with American citizenship, but they have to travel to Taiwan, where trucks packed with campaigners and loudspeakers race through city streets and tens of thousands of people pack rallies.
"I think every person keeps their home country in their heart," said Cupertino resident William Cheng, who is organizing a bus caravan of overseas Taiwanese across Taiwan to campaign for opposition candidate Tsai Ing-wen, who represents the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, which traditionally has favored independence from China.


Tsai, 55, who has a doctorate from the London School of Economics, shows no signs of undoing the economic aspects of Ma’s China policies, though she charges that they have helped spawn economic inequality in Taiwan. She has also accused Ma of undermining Taiwan’s de facto independence in exchange for benefits from the mainland — a claim that resonates strongly with her party’s pro-independence base.


There is some evidence that her populist claims are starting to hit home.


“The economy is the main thing” in the election, said Jenny Wu, the proprietor of a small home wares shop in Taipei. “People will be looking for more opportunities for employment and help for the working class.”


Taiwan, one of Asia’s economic successes for decades and now a center of high-tech development, has turned in a mixed performance under Ma. Unemployment has fallen in the past two years after reaching a high of 6.16 percent in 2009, and preliminary growth figures for 2011 were a respectable 4.5 percent. But housing prices in urban areas have skyrocketed and the income gap has widened, as large companies that invested in the China trade have profited handsomely from new opportunities.


In the closing days of the campaign Tsai has been moving relentlessly toward the center, promising to open a channel to China to offer assurances that she has no intention of embracing the pro-independence policies of Ma’s predecessor, the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian. Chen’s policies infuriated Beijing, and caused great consternation in the U.S., Taiwan’s most important security partner.


Through proxies, Ma has been trying to undermine support for Soong, out of fear that if enough Nationalist backers choose the third-party candidate, the president could lose the election. Some analysts have suggested that if Soong garners 7 percent of the vote or more, Ma will be defeated.


Ma has been buoyed by the arrival of an estimated 300,000 China-based Taiwanese businesspeople, most of whom are expected to vote for the president. Many Taiwanese businesses on the mainland are big Ma backers and have encouraged their workers to support him.