Associated Press

Taipei, July 16:

Taiwan’s largest opposition party chose Taipei mayor Ma Ying-jeou as its new leader today, making him the strong favourite to challenge the independence-leaning China policies of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party in the island’s next presidential election. Ma comfortably overcame legislative speaker Wang Jyn-pyng to take over as head of the Nationalist Party from retiring chairman Lien Chan. On the basis of party precedent, the Harvard-educated Ma will almost certainly lead the Nationalists in the 2008 presidential election. President Chen Shui-bian of the DPP is serving his second term and is constitutionally barred from running again. Early favourites to succeed him include premier Frank Hsieh and DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang.

Ma, a former justice minister, is a strong advocate of the Nationalists’ policy of eventual unification with China, from which Taiwan split in a civil war in 1949. Throughout his campaign against Wang, he criticised the DPP’s policies of strengthening Taiwan’s status as a self-governing entity and underscoring the non-Chinese aspects of its culture and history. Born in Hong Kong to parents from the Chinese mainland, Ma fits firmly into the Nationalists’ traditional mold as the party of the mainland elite, somewhat removed from the majority of the population which traces its roots to ethnic Chinese whose forbears migrated to Taiwan. Since the 1980s the Nationalists have tried to erase that image, and the party’s last presidential incumbent, Lee Teng-hui, was a native Taiwanese.