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※ 引述《yabition0411 (最初的夢想)》之銘言：
: https://instagram.com/p/4E5cQqK6yU/
: TIME雜誌的instagram
: 不過蔡英文這樣感覺好兇
: 沒有什麼柔和感XDDDD
: 旁邊留言好多強國人崩潰
Tsai Ing-wen is making breakfast. The presidential candidate cracks five eggs
and lets them bubble with bacon in the pan. She stacks slices of thick, white
toast. It’s a recipe adapted from British chef Jamie Oliver, but the
ingredients, she can’t help but say, are pure Taiwan. The meat comes
courtesy of Happy Pig, a farm near her spare but tasteful Taipei apartment,
the bread from a neighborhood bakery. She offers me an orange. “Organic,”
 she says, in English. “And local, of course.”



英文說道，「當然也是在地的。」

This is not an average breakfast for the 58-year-old lawyer turned politician
running to become Taiwan’s next President- —most days she grabs a coffee
and books it to the car. But it is, in many ways, oh so Tsai. The
Taipei-raised, U.S.- and U.K.-educated former negotiator wrote her doctoral
thesis on international trade law. As a minister, party chair and
presidential candidate (she narrowly lost to two-term incumbent Ma Ying-jeou
in the 2012 race), Tsai gained a reputation for being wonky—the type who
likes to debate protectionism over early-morning sips of black coffee or
oolong tea.



Now, as the early front runner in Taiwan’s January 2016 presidential
election, her vision for the island is proudly, defiantly, Taiwan-centric.
Tsai says she would maintain the political status quo across the strait with
China—essentially, both Taipei and Beijing agreeing to disagree as to which
represents the one, true China, leaving the question of the island’s fate to
the future. But Tsai wants to put Taiwan’s economy, development and culture
first. While Ma and his government have pushed for new trade and tourism
pacts with Beijing—China accounts for some 40% of Taiwan’s exports—Tsai
aims to lessen the island’s dependence on the mainland by building global
ties and championing local brands. “Taiwan needs a new model,” she tells
TIME.



Whether voters share her vision is a question that matters beyond Taipei.
Taiwan is tiny, with a population of only 23 million, but its economy—
powered by electronics, agriculture and tourism—ranks about mid-20s in the
world by GDP size, with a GDP per capita about thrice that of China’s. Ceded
by China’s Qing dynasty to Japan after the 1894–95 First Sino-Japanese War,
colonized by Tokyo for half a century, then seized by Nationalist forces
fleeing the Communists at the end of the Chinese civil war, Taiwan has long
been a pawn in a regional great game. It is a linchpin for the U.S. in East
Asia alongside Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and, most important, it
’s the only real democracy in the Chinese-speaking world. “This election
matters because it’s a window into democracy rooted in Chinese tradition,”
 says Lung Ying-tai, an author and social commentator who recently stepped
down as Culture Minister. “Because of Taiwan, the world is able to envision
a different China.”

Taiwan’s politics irritate and befuddle Beijing. To the ruling Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), Taiwan is the province that got away, a living,
breathing, voting reminder of what could happen to China if the CCP loosens
its grip on its periphery, from Tibet to Xinjiang to Hong Kong. Beijing is
particularly wary of a change in government from Ma’s relatively
China-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) to Tsai’s firmly China-skeptic Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP). When Tsai ran for President in 2012, Beijing blasted
her, without actually naming her, as a “troublemaker” and “splittist”—
CCP-speak reserved for Dalai Lama–level foes. “A DPP government means
uncertainty for cross-strait ties,” says Lin Gang, a Taiwan specialist at
Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

To the U.S., which is bound by the Taiwan Relations Act to come to the island
’s aid if it’s attacked, Taiwan is a longtime friend and unofficial ally,
though the strength of that friendship is being tested by China’s rise.
Washington worries that Taiwan’s people, especially its youth, are growing
warier of China, and that any conflict between the two might draw in the U.S.
“What this election has done is crystallize the changes, the shift in -
public opinion,” says Shelley Rigger, a Taiwan scholar at Davidson College
in North Carolina and the author of Why Taiwan Matters. “I don’t think
cross-strait relations are going to be easy going forward, and that’s not
something U.S. policymakers want to hear.”

The KMT has yet to formally nominate a candidate for the top job, but the
favorite is Hung Hsiu-chu, the legislature’s female deputy speaker.
Nicknamed “little hot pepper” because of her diminutive stature and feisty
manner, Hung, 67, would be a contrast to the more professorial Tsai should
she get the KMT’s nod. “I don’t think [Tsai] is a strong opponent,” Hung
tells TIME. Yet the DPP’s choice, who has already started pressing the flesh
islandwide, is spirited too. “People have this vision of me as a
conservative person, but I’m actually quite adventurous,” she says. And
possessed of a sharp sense of humor—when I compliment her cooking, Tsai
looks at me with mock exasperation: “I have a Ph.D., you know.”

Tsai grew up in a home on Taipei’s Zhongshan Road North, a street named
after Taiwan’s symbolic father, Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese revolutionary who
helped overthrow the Qing and co-founded the KMT. Her own father, an auto
mechanic turned property developer, was of the Confucian kind: he encouraged
her to study hard but also expected her, as the youngest daughter, to devote
herself to his care. “I was not considered a kid that would be successful in
my career,” says Tsai.

After attending university in Taiwan, she studied law at Cornell in New York
because, she says, it seemed the place for a young woman who “wanted to have
a revolutionary life.” From there she went to the London School of
Economics, where she earned her Ph.D., also in law, in less than three years.
“That pleased my father,” she says. When he called her home, she obliged,
returning to Taiwan to teach and, in 1994, to enter government in a series of
high-profile but mostly policy-- oriented roles in the Fair Trade Commission,
National Security Council and Mainland Affairs Council.

Even close supporters say Tsai was, and perhaps still is, an unlikely
politician, especially for the DPP. Taiwan’s opposition party was forged in
struggle and led by veterans of the democracy movement- —a fight Tsai mostly
missed. The Kaohsiung Incident in 1979—a human- -rights rally that was
violently broken up by security forces, galvanizing the democracy movement—
took place while Tsai was overseas, cocooned in the ivory tower. If the
archetypal DPP operative is a bare-knuckle street fighter, Tsai is an Olympic
fencer—restrained and precise.

She stepped into the spotlight in 2008, becoming party chair when the DPP
found itself booted from office, with its chief Chen Shui-bian, the outgoing
President, later convicted of corruption. While she possessed a deep
knowledge of policy, Tsai did not then seem like a leader. “She used to sort
of hide behind me when we went door to door,” recalls legislator Hsiao
Bi-khim, a longtime colleague and friend. “People compared her to a lost
bunny in the forest, with wolves surrounding, both from within the party and
outside.”

After an unsuccessful 2010 mayoral bid, Tsai ran for, and also lost, the
presidency in 2012. Jason Liu, a veteran DPP speechwriter, says now that the
campaign did not “sell” Tsai well enough. The ideas were strong, but the
delivery left “distance between her and the voters.” Ironically, it was not
until her concession speech that Tsai seemed to connect emotionally with
Taiwan’s citizens. “You may cry,” she told the tearful crowd. “But don’t
lose heart.”

A lot has changed since 2012. Eleven hours after making eggs, with a policy
meeting, a cross-country train ride and a harbor tour behind her, Tsai is
addressing a couple hundred students at a university in the southern city of
Kaohsiung, a DPP stronghold. She’s in lecture mode, at ease, talking about
her party’s economic plans: stronger regional links and a focus on
innovation to support small businesses. “How many of you went to Taipei for
the Sunflower protests?” she asks in Mandarin. At least a third raise their
hands.

Taiwan’s students were once seen as apathetic. But during spring last year,
Taipei was swept up by thousands-strong demonstrations over a services pact
with China. Student and civic groups worried that the deal could hurt Taiwan’
s economy and leave it vulnerable to pressure from Beijing. They felt it was
pushed through without adequate public scrutiny. The Sunflower Movement, as
it came to be called after a florist donated bundles of the blooms, grew into
a grassroots revolt, culminating in the March 18 storming of the legislature.

The movement was grounded in questions of social justice. Since coming to
power in 2008, Ma has argued that cross-strait commerce is the key to the -
island’s fortunes, signing 21 trade deals. Yet young people in particular
wonder if the deals benefit only Big Business on both sides of the strait.
They say rapprochement with Beijing has left them none the richer, and
agonize over the high cost of housing, flat wages and the possibility of
local jobs going to China. A sign during a protest outside the Presidential
Palace on March 30 last year captured the mood: “We don’t have another
Taiwan to sell.”

The emphasis on quality of life, and not just macro-indicators, is good news
for Tsai. Her vision for a more economically independent Taiwan did not sway
the electorate in 2012 but may now have stronger appeal. The KMT, bruised by
the Sunflower protests and then battered by fed-up voters in midterm polls
last fall, is trying to remake itself as a more populist party. Timothy Yang,
a former Foreign Minister who is now vice president of the National Policy
Foundation, the KMT’s think tank, says the party stands by its cross-strait
record. But even Yang, a KMT stalwart, is keen to address the issue of
equity: “The benefits of this interaction with mainland China should be
shared with the general public.”

Tsai should easily carry traditional DPP support: much of the south, the
youth vote, and those who identify as Taiwanese and who are not a part of the
elite that came from China after the CCP victory in 1949. The DPP’s missing
link is Big Business, which supports the KMT and closer ties with the
mainland, where many Taiwan companies are invested. Tsai recognizes that this
is a constituency she needs to woo but doesn’t seem clear as to how, beyond
saying, “Our challenge is to produce something that is sensible to both
sides without being considered as a traitor to the friends we used to be with
when we were an opposition party.”

That will be hard. The KMT has long argued that it, not the DPP, is best
qualified to run the economy, which, corruption apart, did not do well under
Chen. Tsai’s supporters concede that many citizens feel the same way—that
the DPP can be an effective opposition but not administration. “The KMT has
always portrayed itself as more suited to guide the economy,” says J.
Michael Cole, a Taipei-based senior fellow with the University of Nottingham’
s China Policy Institute and a senior officer at Tsai’s Thinking Taiwan
Foundation. “There’s this stubborn perception that a DPP government would
be bad for business.”

It’s a narrative that the CCP backs and may well float as the campaign
progresses, either directly, in China’s state-controlled press, or
indirectly, through, for instance, its connections in Taiwan’s business
community. “Beijing is going to want to make a point through all sorts of
channels, including Big Business, that cross-strait relations will not be as
smooth if you vote a government into power that has not accepted the
foundation that has underpinned developments of the last eight years,” says
Alan Romberg, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, a Washington,
D.C., think tank.

Beijing has never been receptive to a DPP government, but it is particularly
negative now. Since coming to power in 2012, China’s leader Xi Jinping has
proved himself to be more assertive and nationalistic than most expected, a
man not eager to compromise. Last September he told a delegation from the
island that China and Taiwan might be one day be reunited under Hong Kong’s
“one country, two systems” formula, which is rejected by both the KMT and
DPP and, surveys consistently show, the vast majority of Taiwan’s people.
This May, Xi warned again about the danger of “separatist forces”—a
comment widely interpreted as a swipe at the DPP.

Cross-strait relations are managed according to the so-called 1992 Consensus
reached by Beijing and Taipei (then also governed by the KMT), a formula the
KMT’s Yang calls “a masterpiece of ambiguity.” Under the 1992 Consensus,
both sides acknowledge that there is only one China, but without specifying
what - exactly that means. This, Yang says, has allowed the KMT to move
forward on bilateral trade, transport and tourism without being forced to
address whether “one China” is the China imagined by Beijing or by Taipei.

The DPP has long promoted de jure independence. The first clause in its
charter calls for “the establishment of an independent sovereignty known as
the Republic of Taiwan,” not the Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name.
This platform resonates with the DPP base but is increasingly untenable given
China’s economic clout and growing power on the world stage. While the first
DPP presidency under Chen was hardly a break from the past, it did see a
cooling with Beijing. Things warmed again under Ma. Lin, the Taiwan expert at
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says Tsai is somewhere between Chen and Ma: “
If she wins the election, she will not pursue Taiwan independence. But she
will not promote the development of the cross-strait relationship as Ma
Ying-jeou did.”

Tsai stresses that she will not alter the politics between Taiwan and China,
but she is vague about whether she will repeal the DPP’s independence
clause. And unification? That, she says, “is something you have to resolve
democratically—it is a decision to be made by the people here.”

Hung, Tsai’s potential KMT opponent, says the DPP flag bearer needs to
clarify her stance on cross-strait relations. “People ask her, ‘What is the
status quo?’ and she can’t say anything specific,” says Hung. The KMT’s
Yang offers a metaphor: “Before you harvest, you have to plow the land,
transplant the seedlings, fertilize; all the work … has been done by the
KMT, and yet they are going to harvest the crop?”

Tsai believes she will win that right. Several days before I return to my
Beijing base, over Taiwan-Japanese fusion in Kaohsiung, Tsai is quietly
confident that she will gain the trust of Taiwan’s voters and secure
victory, whatever Beijing might think. She puts a final piece of tuna on my
plate. It’s from Pingtung County in the south, where she was born. “Go back
to Beijing,” says Tsai, “and tell them you were served by the next
President of Taiwan.” —With reporting by Zoher - Abdoolcarim, Gladys Tsai
and Natalie Tso/Taipei
我餓了 我也想吃蔡英文手做早餐

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