Several opinion polls conducted just before Ma's assumption of the KMT chairmanship indicated approval ratings below 30 percent and a distinct lack of popular confidence in his capability to concurrently effectively lead both the country and party or achieve genuine reform in the KMT.

These doubts coincide with the public image Ma has earned in the past year for poor crisis management and the dissonance between his cross-strait policy of "leaning to one side" toward the authoritarian People's Republic of China and the mainstream consensus on the importance of Taiwan's continued substantive independence.

Moreover, in his inaugural speech, Ma turned away from widespread hopes that he would put primacy on his democratic accountability to the electorate as president over his party allegiance by openly affirming his predecessors, Lien Chan and Wu Poh-hsiung, would as KMT honorary chairmen continue to play a very crucial role in improving relations with Beijing's Chinese Communist Party regime.

Ma called on Wu to continue to attend sessions of the so-called KMT-CCP "cross-strait economic and cultural forums" and asked Lien to continue as Taiwan's envoy to the upcoming leaders meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Singapore next month.

More worrying, Ma reaffirmed the "five consensuses" reached between CCP General Secretary and PRC State Chairman Hu Jintao and Lien, then KMT chairman, during their first meeting in Beijingin late April 2005, a consensus in which the then opposition KMT entered into without authorization, consultation or ratification by the Taiwan people.

The contents of the Hu-Lien framework include accelerating cross-strait talks, terminating "hostility" and achieving peace agreements, establishing mechanisms for cross-strait cooperation, negotiating ways for Taiwan's "international participation" and setting up platforms for party-to-party dialogue under the assumption of the "Consensus of 1992," which Hu has pointedly defined as being based on Beijing's "one China principle" that posits that Taiwan is part of the PRC."

The unreserved acceptance of the Hu-Lien framework by Ma will lock Taiwan into the PRC's web and will result in the "withering away" of Taiwan's defacto independence as well as a rejection of the pursuit of "formal independence."

With the KMT's horizons contracted from the world community to a bilateral relationship with Beijing, it would be wishful thinking to consider that Ma, Lien or Wu will dare to stand up for Taiwan's interests, whether in terms of negotiations for the so-called "economic cooperation framework agreement" or in the defense of Taiwan's democracy and human rights standards.

Moreover, Ma's affirmation of the primacy of the CCP-KMT party-to-party channel will contain another grave strategic risk for Taiwan in the form of the lack of any legislative or democratic monitoring or legal accountability for negotiations that take place under its umbrella.

Acceptance of the "party-to-party" game rules also grant the predominant position in setting the agenda to Hu, who pointedly placed his title as CCP general secretary first over his PRC state chairmanship during the Oct. 1 celebrations of the PRC's 60th anniversary.

The result will be both Ma's own marginalization compared to Hu's trustees, Lien and Wu, as well as the denigration of Taiwan's hard-won democracy and substantive independence.

In addition, this kind of "cross-strait reconciliation" among two authoritarian and China - centric parties will breed not peace but exacerbation of domestic antagonism as the legitimacy of the KMT government and the self-muzzled KMT majority in the Legislative Yuan erodes in the face of their appeasement of the PRC and the very likely economic and social disaster that will befall most ordinary Taiwan citizens in the wake of the "locking" of our economic and social development into the PRC's orbit.

Last but not least, the KMT's attachment to a "great China" nostalgia and ideological belief that "the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the China race-nation" will sabotage Taiwan's natural alliance as a democratic state with the United States and Japan and lead to Taiwan's self-isolation from international support as Taipei turns from an identity as an Pacific - oriented democratic and high-technology center and narrows its sights to being a peripheral territory in a virtual "great China."

The growing sense among many of Taiwan's 23 million people that their right to decide their own future is slipping away into the hands of a China - oriented KMT government and, ultimately, into Beijing's hegemony is fuelling anxiety in Taiwan society and, when combined with the realization of the KMT's bureaucratic incompetence, is eroding approval and confidence in the Ma government.

However, whether Taiwan's diverse and fragmented civil society and democratic political forces can look beyond their own particular and parochial interests to grasp the urgency of putting the defense of Taiwan's democracy and substantive independence first and restoring Taiwan-centric governance remains to be seen.