The rationale for ousting is an influence peddling scandal. Chiu Yi, a KMT legislator, accused Chen's son-in-law, Chao Chien-min, of making $13 million using dummy accounts to buy 20 million real estate shares. Taiwan media said Chao's mother bought from a partly-state owned bank. The presidential office quoted Chao saying he had no knowledge of mother's investments. Earlier Taipei District Court had arrested Chen Che-nan, a former senior aide to Chen, after repeated fraud charges.

Chen has already lightened his baggage, publicly turning over short-term government functions to Prime Minister Su Tseng-chang. [He assured a visiting American: "In the past, the party and executive branch turned to me to settle personnel and policy differences. Now, they have to make their calls. There is a change in the common practice but the change does not affect my duties as stipulated in the Constitution."]

Chen had little choice since Party rebels tossed out the chairman and demanded a larger policy role for the Party’s parliamentary caucus. And although the KMT and friends have a small parliament majority [even though it doesn’t own the government in the island’s complex system], it probably doesn’t have the votes.

That won’t stop clamor in the streets and Taiwan’s highly partisan media — and an echo chamber on the Mainland which considers Chen and his DPP a main obstacle to regaining its “renegade” province. [Ironically, a WWII interview by redoubtable Edgar Snow quoted Mao Tse-tung saying Formosa should decide postwar whether it wanted to return to China.]

After helping reelect Chen in 2004 with attempted intimidation, cooler heads have taken over in Beijing. Flattery and enticement has brought the KMT around to talking about accommodation [at least while out of office]. In mid-April, the KMT shepherded a couple of dozen Taiwan businessmen to Beijing cohosted by the Chinese Communist Party to boost trade and investment. They even pinpointed fruit and market garden operators with trade concessions in Chen’s base in southern Taiwan who once enthusiastically endorsed the DPP’s call for Taiwan independence.

Mainland economic relations are becoming stickier and stickier for Chen, once the darling of native Taiwanese businessmen. In his Jan. 1 state annual policy speech Chen warned, again, against becoming too dependent economically on the Mainland.. But with the increasingly bitter competition among East Asian economies for exports, Taiwan’s entrepreneurs are worried. The economy has slowed. Although the Asian Development Bank expects a 4 percent GDP growth rate this year, that’s small potatoes for one of the world’s most dynamic economies.

The Mainland is already Taiwan’s No. 1 trading partner, $71.7 billion last year, with a $31.8 billion surplus, up 12.6 percent, almost a fifth of total trade. Although Chen officially advocates "proactive liberalization with effective management", Taiwan theoretically restricts Mainland investorments to 40 percent of a company's asset value and regulations ban more than 100 industries.

Taiwanese businesses have in fact flouted regulations, some even cutting ties with Taiwan, or using tax havens to route capital to the Mainland. There are at least 400,000 Taiwanese owners, managers and workers now living in Shanghai alone. According to official figures, investments totaling $47.2 billion were officially approved from 1991 to 2005, but business circles guess it may be closer to $100 billion. Now overbanked Taiwan financial institutions are champing at the bit to get into China’s liberalizing banking business.

Multinational investors — publicly backed by U.S. Deputy Trade Representative Karan Bhatia, highest ranking American official to visit Taiwan in six years in May — have warned Chen if he doesn’t expand Mainland ties, Taiwan’s trade-dependent economy will suffer. Chen, who recently rowed with the U.S. when Washington wouldn’t permit an Alaskan stopover on a visit to some of the few foreign countries still maintaining relations with Taipei, has tried to cover that base with a new affirmation he would not call for independence — Washington’s strictest no-no in its oft stated strategy to prevent a Communist military takeover.

Remember Taiwanese: democrats [little”d”] never promised you a rose garden!

It’s oft repeated but worth one more time: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” [Winston Churchill, leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, House of Commons, Nov. 11, 1947, not long after he got tossed out of office].

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.