Keeping It Legal

In the humid, freshly painted auditorium of Taipei's city hall last week, aging (72) Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek once again ringingly assured his National Assembly that Nationalist China's victory over the Communist government in Peking was a dead certainty. Said Chiang: "Once the hour strikes . . . we shall be able to win as naturally as floodwaters flowing downhill form a big stream in the plain."

His high-pitched voice unfaltering, Chiang went on: "But I am sorry to say that the heavy responsibility of recovering the mainland and rebuilding our nation entrusted to me by the National Assembly still remains to be successfully discharged. I feel greatly ashamed in facing our compatriots on the mainland who are awaiting deliverance more anxiously than ever. So great is my fault that I wish sincerely to surrender myself to you for punishment."

Changing the Rules. In fact, as Chiang well knew, chances that the National Assembly would take his classical Chinese self-deprecation at face value were slim indeed. Instead, what was primarily worrying the Assemblymen was how to elect him to a third term as President of the refugee government on Formosa without openly flouting Nationalist China's 1948 constitution.

Chiang's second six-year term will expire next month, and nowhere in sight is there anyone who could hold Nationalist China together as he does. To amend the constitution to permit a third term requires a two-thirds quorum of the National Assembly, an impossibility. A full Assembly is 3,045 members. Only 1,453 of them -- men in their 60s and 70s, and nominally representing not districts in Formosa but constituencies in Canton, Shanghai or other mainland cities--are now on the island. The rest are either in Communist hands or have died off in the ten years since the Red takeover of the mainland.

Fortnight ago the Council of Grand Justices, Nationalist China's top constitutional court, sought to clear the way for a constitutional amendment by ruling that the total membership of the National Assembly should be considered to be only the number of members actually able to attend meetings in Taipei. But Chiang himself argued against an amendment permitting a third term on the ground that the 1948 constitution was the Nationalists' "most powerful weapon" morally for reconquering the mainland.

Ready to Travel. Undaunted, Formosa's constitutional experts have made yet another proposal: let the no-third-term rule be suspended "for the duration of the emergency" by rewriting the presidential emergency powers adopted in 1948 as a temporary addendum to the constitution. This, while serving to keep Chiang in office indefinitely, would not, Nationalist officials argue, amount to a formal amendment of the constitution itself. So far Chiang, who talks blandly of foreign travel "when I am no longer burdened down with the duties of President," has refrained from giving the plan his open endorsement, but the drum-beating now going on suggests that the third-term drive has full official sanction.

A foreign diplomat in Taipei, enthralled by the ingenuity of the maneuver, last week described it as "realistic, inevitable --and legal."

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