Is Chen the One?

He wonders about greatness, about what it takes. As the blue-and-white presidential Sikorsky lifts off from Nantou air force base, he considers the evolution he must make from brilliant lawyer and astute politician to wise leader and great man. It is a question raised by the very aspirations of his people and the potential of his state: Is Chen Shui-bian good enough, wise enough, man enough, to take Taiwan where it deserves to go? The helicopter takes flight, pushing the President back into his silver seat. He looks even smaller than his 1.65 m. His wire-frame glasses and white windbreaker and silver-gray slacks make him appear delicate and vulnerable. You can’t help noting the mission ahead of himleading Taiwan through a treacherous geopolitical landscape while propping up a floundering economy and fending off hostile domestic oppositionand wonder if this retiring, eager-eyed former maritime lawyer can really remake himself as a world-class leader. The transformation, he hopes, begins today. “This is a great moment,” Chen says. “We’re writing the history of Taiwan. This moment, right now, is the most influential in our history. We can decide what our nation, our path, will be.”

Taiwan, at this moment, right now, is an island on the brink: of embroilment in superpower conflict, of descent into economic distress, but also of an unprecedented national awakening and cultural flowering of, dare anyone say it, nationhoodnot in constitutional terms but, perhaps more importantly, in cultural terms. The 22.2 million Taiwaneseand the rest of Asia as wellhave now posited a Taiwan that is so much more than cold war bulwark and superpower pawn. The island that used to be thought of as the un-China, the anti-Mao or, later, the chip fabricator, the hardware producer, is now the bustling cultural center of Greater China. Of course the mainland still dominates the Chinese world in geopolitical and economic terms, but whose soap operas are they watching in Bangkok and whose Mando-pop CDs are they buying in Kuala Lumpur? Outside of Japan, Taiwan is Asia’s leading pop cultural exporter. And when you’re exporting your music, movies and TV shows, that means other countries are interested in what you think, who you are. The upshot is a state that confidently and pragmatically goes about its business (even though much of that business is on the mainland). And as you wander through Taipei or tour the countryside, you realize that the hoary topic of re-unification is not so much an issue as an irrelevance, a political parlor game fraught with linguistic and semantic tricks played out in Beijing, Washington and Taipeia game that increasingly seems as anachronistic as the terms still used to describe cross-strait relations: Arms Race, Balance of Power, DEtente.

As he prepares to embark on a state visit to Latin America that will include transit stops in New York and Houston, Chen is readying a turn on the international stage. In Beijing, however, Chen’s visit to the U.S. has caused barely a blip. China is “firmly opposed” to the trip, of course, but the government hasn’t issued a statement since the transit stops were announced. Indeed, Beijing’s position on Chen has been to have no position: the state-run media hasn’t yet mentioned him by name. But Chen’s anonymity in Beijing is a stark contrast to his globally more visible role brought on by recent American approval of a sophisticated arms-sales package to Taiwan and the deteriorating state of Sino-U.S. relations. Increasingly the spotlight is on Taiwanand Chen. For the island’s majority, the attention may be unwelcome. The place has been thriving in its political ambiguity. Is it China? Not China? Does it really matter anymore to the average Taiwanese?

But for Chen, these same geopolitical forces have created a unique opportunity. A new President in the U.S. Possibly a new leader in China within two years. And some shifting in Beijing’s rigid Taiwan policy: Vice Premier Qian Qichen recently stressed that Taiwan and the mainland are part of one China. All previous doctrines had hinted that Beijing should govern Taiwan. The change in tone suggests there’s room to negotiate. For Taiwan and its President, these are heady times. But can the 51-year-old seize the moment and make it his?

For Taiwan’s twenty- and thirtysomethings, to whom Chen probably owes his March 2000 plurality victory when he took just 39% of the overall vote, the notion of reunification with the mainlandeven along the lines of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems”is not so much unpalatable as non sequitur. Why, exactly, should Taiwan subsume its coolness to China’s cultural bludgeon? There really isn’t a good reason except some notion that one China is better than two. But in more than 50 years as a de facto state, and particularly over the past decade, Taiwan has forged a separate history and identity that call out for a President vibrant and muscular enough to put his personal stamp on this era. His predecessor, Lee Teng-hui, made enormous strides promoting Taiwan’s democratic institutions and mentality, raising Taiwanese national consciousness and standing up to China. He also aspired to greatness and came close to it with his overwhelming 1996 electoral victory in the face of Chinese saber-rattling. With Lee in retirement, who will now take Taiwan through this millennial upshifting, who can handle the levers and gears to smooth the exhilarating ride?

A year ago it was enough that Chen was Taiwan’s pioneering non-Kuo-mintang (KMT) President, the first head of state not affiliated with Chiang Kai-shek’s founding party. A year into his term, Chen’s novelty as an opposition figure has worn off. He is mainstream now, occupying the political center, and has to present himself more as what he is than what he is not. Chen has to give people something to believe in, show the taxi drivers in Kaohsiung and the betel nut salesgirls in Chiayi what he is about. He must now explain, vividly, what he is. “He’s no great shakes as a presence,” says a senior U.S. official in Washington. “There is more to me than meets the eye,” Chen has countered. “It is my destiny to lead Taiwan.”

They call him A-Bian, a diminutive that traces to his boyhood in Hsi-chuang, a village 40 minutes from Tainan, Taiwan’s fourth-largest city. Renowned for its water chestnuts and mangoes, Hsi-chuang is still a rural community, despite being part of a township with a main road bristling with Toyota dealerships and Nikkomarts. The citizens make their living from the soil, and everyone knows the business of Mrs. Chang down the street, for example, and her son Li who just bought a new Nissan Cefiro. They speak Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent so thick that mainlanders can’t follow a word.

This is the Taiwanese heartland, where kids still play marbles with pits of dragon eye fruit the way Chen did when he was a boy. They still go swimming in the creek and roast water chestnuts on charcoal braziers. When Chen was growing up here during the 1950s, Taiwan was still struggling for survival; today’s grandiose notion of cultural identity was a distant luxury. While the newly arrived leaders of the Kuomintang, freshly landed from the mainland, were building their capital in Taipei, for the native Taiwanese, descendants mostly of Fujian and Guangdong natives who settled during the 17th century, life was hardscrabble. What kids like A-Bian dreamed about was a full stomach. He ate only rice most meals. Beef, chicken and fish were for special occasions. His family’s typical stone, red-roofed house consisted of four simple rooms built around a courtyard and an open hearth. They used to write on the charcoal-stained walls in chalk how much they owed to neighbors and merchants. His father was a day laborer.

In Taiwan’s rigorous academic meritocracy, good students are praised and respected; great students become the object of local pride. A-Bian was the greatest student Tainan county had ever seen, his intelligence and perspicacity as obvious and tangible as an Olympic sprinter’s speed. “He was always the brightest in his classes,” says Chen Chia-cheng, his sixth-grade teacher. “He used to finish his homework for the night before lunchtime.” His classmates recall a studious, diminutive boy, annoyingly prim, his hand shooting up to provide correct answers to teachers’ queries. “He never picked a fight,” says Chen Wen-chuan, an elementary-school classmate who still lives in the township, “because he knew he would lose if he did.” He was the kind of student whose academic reputation preceded him wherever he went: he was first in his class in elementary school, middle school and high school. His studiousness and scholastic achievement were his defining attributes. The takeaway from his childhood successes: as long as you are prepared, boned up on whatever subject is at hand, you will succeed.

By the time he married high-school sweetheart Wu Shu-chen, Chen had passed the bar exam as a National Taiwan University undergraduate and was moving into private practice as a lawyer. Through this phase of his career and the nexthis emergence as a political figure following his stellar defense of the “Kaohsiung Eight” opposition group charged with plotting to overthrow the government, and his subsequent terms in office as a legislator and the mayor of Taipeihis approach remained basically the same: to out-prepare, out-study, out-argue and out-campaign his rival, whether that was opposing counsel or a KMT politician. His method was bluntly effective and essentially unchanged from his academic blueprint: work harder, better and longer and eventually you will persevere. “He’s a workaholic. He just doesn’t stop studying,” says Hu Chung-hsin, a former adviser. Hu thinks it all traces back to Chen’s poverty: “He’s insecure about his past.”

Despite Chen’s success, one also detects the desperate grasping of a social climber in his tireless rise up the meritocracy. Indeed, he has gone about as far as one can on brains and effort: all the way to the presidency. But to reach the next level, to become a great President, requires vision. And you can’t find that in any textbooks. “What Chen lacks is emotional intelligence,” says Hu, “he doesn’t have that. How can you be a great leader without that kind of emotional center?” Chen says he is working on that, studying up on being emotionally intelligent just as he once crammed for trigonometry exams. “There are imperfections in my life. It’s like a missing corner. The missing corner makes the picture imperfect, but it also has the infinite potential for what it can be.”

The president walks softly, his black sneakers squishing along the concrete path between lilies and the white stucco walls of the presidential mansion. As he points out a Ju Ming sculpture he admires and some work he’s had done to the house, his gestures are compact, as if his arms automatically seek the shortest distance between repose and extension. His bearing is quiet, but always lurking is the authority, both of his formidable intellect and his high office. To his credit, he wears his achievements as easily as his blue oxford shirt. In these moments, as he shows off his newly remodeled home, he becomes the Taiwanese everymansuccessful, middle-class, proud of his detached house and little garden. The outfitwire-frame glasses, the oxford, the chinos, the shoesgives him the look of a millennial cyberpeasant. If he weren’t President, his sartorial choices seem to say, he would be running a fab or dreaming up a new vertical B2B application.

He has stumbled into this image, this sort of regular Chou appeal. For most Taiwanese, he is like them, with the same values, aspirations and wants for his family and his state, only smarter. Isn’t that what you desire in a President, someone who thinks like you, understands the complications of everyday living yet is equipped with the mental tools to solve these problems? Chen communicates that sort of pragmatic intelligence. He’s a Taiwanese Al Gore, and that’s part of his problem. He could do with a bit of Clintonian warmth and charm. He struggles to connect, which is surprising considering that he has a cuddly-cute sort of marketabilitythe doe-eyed A-Bian doll, by all accounts, helped him charm younger voters in last year’s election.

The cuddliness is the trait that keeps him from seeming smarmy. “He is a political leader with charisma,” says a former Cabinet minister. “He knows how to speak the people’s language.” For a politician to come across as having school-marmish intelligence without the humanizing mushy center can mean an abbreviated career. People don’t want their elementary-school principal running the countryhe was bad enough when he was just running your school. We all want a bright leader, but one also equipped with an enormous heart. Whether Chen has that is a matter of some debate. Even his wife accuses him of being a purely sectarian animal, of having traded family for his own political future. “He’s a great politician,” she says. “But a terrible father.”

In order to truly succeed in politics, it is necessary to be more than a great politician. He needs to be a strong man, a father, a husband, a cool dude, all at the same time. In other words, a populist who can tug Taiwan’s voters to the polls this December and lead his Democratic People’s Party (DPP) to a legislative plurality. Great leaders like Roosevelt, Mao and Chiang Kai-shek had that ability to reach through whatever medium they were using and connect with their people. For Chen, successful at everything he has done, finding a way to make that connection is proving his greatest challenge. You can’t bone up on empathy or cram your way into the hearts and minds of your voters.

To better reach out, Chen has reached in, exploring his own emotional core. “I’ve been through hardships and failures,” he says, citing his 1985 loss in Tainan county, a prison stay in 1986 for libel, his 1998 second term mayoral loss in Taipei. “I can’t say that every great leader must go through hardship, but I know that it makes me a better leader.”

The hair is immaculately parted over a wide, tanned forehead and small, almost feminine ears. His eyes are hooded, the eyelids drooping through the gold, wire-frame glasses. As he speaks, his hands flutter, join, then roll to make a point. What he projects, more than anything else, is earnestness. He wants to do a good job: in this interview, in the morning briefing, running Taiwan.

He sits in a bamboo chair on a small patio next to a carp pond. This is his retreat, a small backyard behind his remodeled house where he can listen to the babbling waterfall and relax beneath giant spider lilies. He concedes that as a boy he never dreamed of living in this sort of luxury.

He talks often about his dark past, about the struggles and the hard times, in particular about the car accident that left his wife paralyzed. They were on a tour of Tainan county to thank supporters in an election he had just lost. His wife, Wu Shu-chen, a narrow-framed woman with a thin face, was walking at the head of the party, Chen was toward the back. A black truck came roaring around a corner and struck Wu, running over her legs. The driver stopped, put the truck in reverse and then backed over her. Chen swears it was a politically motivated attack and that he had been threatened by gangsters during the campaign. He had not heeded the threats, and last-minute vote-buying by the KMT had swayed the election. The hit, Chen’s supporters say, was a warning to him as a rising opposition star: stay out of politics. (Police have ruled the whole affair an accident.)

“That was the lowest point of my life. I often ask myself in the middle of the night why I have had such a hard life,” he says. Lately he has been thinking about the days just after the accident, when he sat with his wife in the intensive care unit of Taichung Veterans General Hospital. In the hot, stuffy ward with its pale yellow curtains and beige walls, he was overwhelmed by his guilt at what had happened to her. If he had never gone into politics and had stayed a corporate lawyer, he and his wife could have avoided this tragedy. “You must hate me,” he said to her.

You speak the truth at times like that, he says, when the woman you love has a breathing tube down her throat and the doctors aren’t sure she’s going to make it. You tell her she needs to live, for your son and your daughter, for you. You try to inspire her, to enliven her, to do whatever it takes to keep that heart beating.

In this crucible of familial tragedy and personal suffering, he grew a little, acquired dimensions and depth he had been lacking. It brought out the best in Chen. And it illuminated him as to the complexities and nuances of life’s journey. His own course, despite electoral setbacks and political difficulties, had been a jagged upward sheer. Or, as his wife says, “Our lives were perfect before the accident.” And suddenly he understood that life was fraught with hardships, even for an A-student who thought he had been diligently preparing for all of life’s great tests. In some sense, it was that tragedy that made him complete, that began the transformation from Teflon politician to feeling, vulnerable man.

“Very few people have paid such a price,” he says, “I’m not religious but I have to believe that God has a plan. God challenged me so that I could lead Taiwan to democracy. My wife has been in a wheelchair for the past 16 years. If I could trade my career, my presidency so that we could walk together again, I would.”

But, of course, that’s not possible, he says, shrugging, standing and then walking through the sliding door into his living room. He shows the elevator he had installed for his wife. And then he marvels over a gigantic pumpkin that was a gift from the farmers of Hwalian county. After his heartfelt explanation of his wife’s accident, this tour of the presidential mansion suddenly feels calculated, as if he’s now presenting Exhibit A of the better-rounded man. He wants to show that despite criticism, he has leisurely pursuits and cultivated tastes, that he’s not, as one former aide commented, “100% lawyer.” He shows off his collection of modern Chinese art, proudly reciting how much each painting is worth.

Chen Shui-bian will face a mandate on his presidency in early December when all 225 seats of the Legislative Yuan come up for grabs. Until now, Chen’s ability to push through a legislative program and stamp a new imprint on Taiwanese society has been stymied by the KMT’s hold on a majority of parliamentary seats. His own DPP controls barely one-third of the seats. Since no party is likely to win a majority in the vote, taking 80 or 85 seats in the Yuan would be a crucial gain for Chen and his DPP. It would also be a tribute to how divided his opposition is. The KMT, led by Lien Chan, and the People’s First Party, led by former KMT stalwart James Soong, have opposing interests and will find it difficult to coalesce. A good showing in December, and Chen’s disappointing first yearespecially his mishandling of a pledge to keep Taiwan nuclear-free by canceling and then reinstating a planned power plantcould be forgotten as Chen pushes through his legislative agenda. As mayor of Taipei, he was a tireless promoter of quality of life issuesshutting down sex shops, getting a light-rail urban transit system into operation, installing special bus lanes to unsnarl Taipei’s notorious traffic and beautifying the city.

But he has yet to adequately explain to Taiwan his vision for the country. And the country, despite its pop-cultural frenzy, desperately needs a blueprint to climb out of its economic morass. The Taipei Stock Exchange is down 40% since Chen was elected, and joblessness is at a 23-year high at 3.9%. The Taiwanese for decades forgave the KMT for a multitude of sinseven the imposition of martial lawas long as its stewardship kept economic growth pumping away. Chen cannot expect the same degree of patience in a floundering economy. He needs the people on his side. He needs a legislative victory.

A tireless campaigner, he is on the road again, selling his message of DPP victory this December but more importantly selling A-Bian, the plucky little A-student from Hsi-chuang. Only now he wants to be the popular kid instead of the smart kid, the one you want to hang out with rather than the one whose homework you want to borrow. Then he can lead, because if you like him you will trust him.

The helicopter sets down in Nantou county, next to a roadside restaurant where the waitresses and cooks have all come to stand by the road, their outfits buffeted by the rotor’s downdraft. The President and his entourage are hustled into waiting Ford Econoline vans and then driven to Shi To National Park, where they attend a ceremony honoring efforts to rebuild after the September 1999 earthquake. Under a stained, blue-red-and-white canopy, the President listens as Nantou’s deputy mayor explains how they had to bore through rocks to reopen the highway. A hundred locals sit on white plastic chairs, gawking at the President.

Then Chen addresses the small crowd under the canopy, straining to find that memorable tonehis voice modulating, his thick southern accent wandering through tenor registers as he praises the community for pulling together. He has done a hundred of these stump speechesdedicating elementary schools, christening buildings, opening military bases. What he is saying is by now rote, the usual praise for Taiwan and the spirit of its people. But what he seems to be trying to get across is: come with me, come with me to this new Taiwan, this better place, we will have to find it together.

The crowd sits on their hands. They seem to be listening. Then it starts raining and Chen’s words are lost in the patter of drops on the canopy roof.