Taiwan will choose its top China negotiator as its next premier for lack of other job candidates as the former premier leaves to ease tension in the ruling party ahead of the 2008 presidential race, a source said on Sunday.
Chang Chun-hsiung, chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation and a former premier, will replace Su Tseng-chang, who announced on Saturday he would step down.
Su, who lost the Democratic Progressive Party presidential primary last week to another former premier, Frank Hsieh, is the fifth premier to step down during the president's seven-year tenure.
Analysts said President Chen Shui-bian did not want Su, a folksy man popular among common people but who does not side with the ruling party's mainstream, to steal the limelight from Hsieh by sticking around.
No one else wanted to be premier for only a year, which is too little time in office to make a difference, the source said. Chen must step down at the end of his term in May 2008.
Analysts say Chang is friendly to both Chen and the party's 2008 presidential nominee, who faces a tough contest in March against popular former Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou. Ma is conciliatory toward Taiwan's archrival China, while the ruling party takes a hard line against it.
Chang, Chen and Hsieh were all dissident lawyers under Nationalist Party rule, said Chao Chien-min, a professor at National Cheng Chi University in Taiwan. Although Hsieh and Chang have had "differences," they accept each other now, he said.
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