Taiwan's Chen Shui-bian and Thailand's Thaksin: A Comparison of Two Asian Populist Leaders

I think an interesting comparison and contrast can be made between Taiwan's former President, Chen Shui-bian, and another populist ex-leader of an Asian country, Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Prime Minister of Thailand. The similarities are numerous: both were born a year apart, and grew up in rural areas of their respective countries. Politically, they both enjoyed the support of the working classes and agricultural areas of the country. Both men were twice elected democratically in free and fair elections. Both tried to use populist programs and policies to motivate and maintain their power bases. Both men operated within an inherently corrupt political system to build up a power base that could rival and threaten their entrenched opposition parties. Their opposition parties (the Chinese Nationalists (KMT) in Taiwan and the "Democratic" Party of Thailand) enjoyed huge support from within their respective capital cities and represented "the elites" of their respective countries: extremely wealthy, intertwined and entrenched, hugely corrupt centers of power, including the military, the government bureaucracies, the police, the media, the judiciary, and wealthy business leaders.

In 2006, these "elite" centers of powers attempted to overthrow both men by undemocratic means. For Chen, he was surrounded for two months by the phony, KMT-led "red ant" protesters, who wanted to depose him. Luckily, democracy prevailed in Taiwan. Unfortunately for Thaksin, his undemocratic deposers were successful, having gotten the King's permission to lead a bloodless coup against Thaksin.

Since then, Chen's and Thaksin's stories have widely diverged. Thaksin was able to escape Thailand to avoid the political persecutions by the opposition and avoid imprisonment for a long string of corruption charges, many of them politically motivated. Recently, the Thai High court found Thaksin guilty in abstentia of various corruption charges, and seized more than $1 billion belonging him and his family. Chen stuck around to face the charges after this term ended, and now has received an unprecedented life-sentence by a KMT-manipulated kangaroo court on a long string of corruption charges, many of them politically motivated.

But both men were populist outsiders who decided to use the corrupt political system to enrich themselves and their party as a way of fighting their respective opposition parties, which had created the corrupt system to enrich themselves and retain power for many previous decades.

Even if both men are truly guilty of these charges, the verdicts of these trials have revealed the utter hypocrisy and biases prevalent in the judicial systems of both countries. In both Thailand and Taiwan, the old ruling elite still wield incredible powers to control the outcome of these trials. For instance, the current Taiwan KMT President, Ma Ying-jeou, was caught wiring public money from a special affairs fund directly into his bank account when he was mayor of Taipei. Former KMT "Governor of Taiwan" James Soong got caught TWICE wiring left-over campaign funds to overseas bank accounts without reporting it to the government. Neither of these men were ever led away in handcuffs. Neither of them ever spent a day in jail. Rather, they were let off with barely a slap on the wrists and allowed to continue their political careers.

Compare that with the treatment Chen Shui-bian has received ON IDENTICAL CHARGES: he's been given a life sentence, virtually his entire family has been framed on various corruption charges, and political donations to his political party have now been deemed by the KMT-controlled courts to be bribes. Similarly, the generals and ruling aristocracy in Thailand have been engorging themselves from the public till for decades. None of them ever saw a day in jail. It's only when an outsider threatened the power of these entrenched elites did the normal practices of these politicians suddenly become "corruption."

Is power too endemically corrupting to ever find a true, pure champion of the poor and exploited masses in these two countries? How can anyone ever find the money and power to compete democratically with entrenched power-elites who continue to enjoy the fruits of the corrupt system they themselves created?