E-Notes

Taiwan’s Perilous Transition

by Shelley Rigger

June 6, 2001

Shelly Rigger is the Brown Associate Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College and author of Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (Routledge, 1999) and From Opposition to Power: Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (Lynne Rienner, forthcoming 2001). This essay is based on a presentation to FPRI’s InterUniversity Study Group on the US and Asia on May 9, 2001. For related E-Notes, see “Chen Shui-bian: A President’s Progress,” by Harvey Sicherman (May 11, 2001) and “Toward a Resolution of the Taiwan Strait Problem,” by Lorna Hahn (May 21, 2001)

In an interview with USAToday.com posted on May 2, Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian offered a modest defense of his first year in office. In winning the presidency a year ago, Chen, who represents the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was the first opposition politician to capture a branch of the national government from Taiwan’s long-time ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT).

In defending his record over the past 11 months, Chen remarked, “We have successfully completed our very first and very peaceful transfer of power, and we are very pleased by this accomplishment despite chaos in our legislature and in our media… Before the election, cross-Strait relations were considered the DPP’s and my personal weakness by the general public… By now, even though we haven’t achieved any breakthroughs, relations have not worsened.”

It seems little enough to boast of— a transfer of power that was chaotic, although not violent; a relationship with China that has seen neither progress nor regress. The limited nature of Chen’s achievements underscores the difficulty of his first year in office, but also serves as a reminder of something we ought to know by now: transitions from authoritarianism to democracy are often protracted, and are nearly always fraught with uncertainty and peril

Chen Shui-Bian’s Annus Horriblus

There is no shortage of evidence that Chen Shui-bian’s first year in office was filled with hardship. On the economic front, Taiwan suffered a significant rise in unemployment (rising from a high of 2.9 percent in 1999 to nearly 4 percent in April 2001), while the Taiwan Stock Exchange has fallen from 8,600 to about 5,000 in the past 12 months. Politically, Chen has seen numerous challenges to his authority, including a recall effort in October and November in which members of the KMT and its successor parties, James Soong’s People First Party (PFP) and the New Party, attempted to remove the president from office. Most recently, law-makers from those parties— who hold almost two-thirds of the seats in Taiwan’s legislature — have called for the resignation of Premier Chang Chun-hsiung. Nor has Taiwan made the progress Chen had hoped for in its external relations. Although Beijing has toned down the angry rhetoric of a year ago, there is little sign that dialogue between Mainland and Taiwan authorities will resume soon.

Coverage of Chen’s first year in office by Taiwan’s domestic media and the international press, has focused on these negative developments. However, it is possible to discern a number of more positive trends and developments. To begin with, it is deceptive to blame political changes on Taiwan for the island’s economic woes; in fact, its economic troubles are shared by economies around the region, and the world. The declines in its stock market are matched or exceeded by others East Asian bourses, not to mention the NASDAQ. Given Taiwan’s tech-heavy market, it was inevitable that a weakening world market for technology shares and products would have a strong impact on Taiwan’s financial world.

At the same time, cross-strait relations — while experiencing little or no progress in the past year— have stabilized, following years of deterioration. Beijing has put aside the angry language that characterized Chinese leaders’ rhetoric toward President Lee Teng-hui and candidate Chen Shui-bian. Beijing is targeting its rage on specific (relatively marginal) figures such as Vice President Annette Lu, while deploying a united front strategy aimed at wooing Chen’s political adversaries. Meanwhile, scores of Taiwanese business leaders and politicians have visited the mainland since Chen’s inauguration, where they have received a friendly reception. Many of these visitors have returned to Taiwan to urge Chen to expand trade and investment across the Strait. Some have also spoken favorably of Beijing’s proposals for political talks leading to unification. This honey-instead-of-vinegar approach has contributed to a softening of attitudes toward the mainland among the Taiwanese people. Still, there is an important exception to this trend. Mainland leaders have pointedly excluded Chen Shui-bian and his party from their charm offensive, preferring to concentrate their energies on his political opponents.

Political scientists have long identified the first turnover of power from an authoritarian ruling party to the opposition as a key moment in the democratization process. Making that transition smoothly is always difficult, and since the KMT enjoys electoral legitimacy in the legislature, it saw little reason to yield power to its long-time opposition when the DPP captured the presidency. To make matters worse, the institution of the presidency established by the ROC constitution is a relatively weak office. As a result, Taipei is now the site of a protracted struggle between the executive and legislative branches over how authority is to be distributed under divided government.

The chaos and conflict that marked Chen’s first year in office partially masked an important feature of Taiwan’s transition to a DPP presidency. This transfer of power, however contested, almost certainly permanently altered the nature of politics in Taiwan. The return of non-democratic, single-party rule is highly unlikely. One possible outcome is realignment and restructuring in the party system; the KMT, which already has fissioned off two new parties, the New Party and the People First Party, may well split again, or lose members to a DPP-led coalition. And even if the KMT holds together and regains control of the executive branch while maintaining its edge in the legislature, the DPP is now an established player in national politics. Multi-party competition is institutionalized; dominant-party politics is unlikely to revive.

Chen Shui-bian’s life has been marked by extremes of fortune, but perhaps his most astounding stroke of luck was to benefit from a startling strategic error by his opponents, not once but twice. In 1994, Chen won the Taipei City mayor’s race with just under 44 percent of the vote. This minority vote share translated into victory because the conservative vote was split between candidates representing the KMT and the New Party. In 1998, these two parties joined forces to defeat Chen’s reelection bid. But the lesson was not well and fully learned; in the 2000 presidential race, the KMT failed to unify its supporters under a single candidate. Instead, James Soong, long a KMT stalwart, broke with his party and ran an independent campaign, while the KMT insisted on a much weaker candidate, incumbent vice president Lien Chan. (In the end, Soong captured 37 percent of the vote, Lien, 23 percent.)

Chen’s victory in the presidential race rested on two factors. First, the KMT split made it possible to win without capturing a significant share of conservative votes. Second, Chen was able to overcome the reluctance of many voters who had shown a willingness to support the DPP in local races, but had doubts about the party’s ability to handle national office. Chen’s 39 percent vote share reflected his successful strategy of reassuring voters that he would not endanger the island’s security by taking an extreme position on the independence issue. Chen’s position on cross-strait relations was not significantly different from those of his opponents; if anything, Chen was more congenial to some of Beijing’s preferences, including opening direct trade and transportation links between Taiwan and the mainland.

Winning the presidency was difficult, but governing Taiwan turned out to be an even bigger challenge for a number of reasons. First, Taiwan’s constitution created a highly problematic institutional environment for the debut of divided government. The ROC constitution combines elements of presidential and parliamentary government, without providing adequate mechanisms for resolving contradictions between the two. For example, the president selects the premier, who heads the executive branch and proposes legislation. The president’s choice does not require legislative approval. If the legislature finds the premier unacceptable, its only option is to undertake a vote of no confidence, which, if it passes, opens the door for the president to dissolve the legislature. Thus, competing incentives make it likely that a legislature that opposes the premier will choose obstinacy and gridlock over decisive action. At the same time, the president’s freedom of action is stymied by the absence of a presidential veto or direct control over the cabinet.

A second problem facing President Chen was a lack of confidence from the start. Not surprisingly, given that he was elected with less than 40 percent of the vote, many Taiwanese doubted his ability. As the economic situation in Taiwan (and the rest of the world) deteriorated, these doubts intensified. But declining confidence further damaged the economy. These two trends reinforced one another, prompting a downward spiral in both the economic and political realms.

This spiral gained further momentum from some key mistakes President Chen made early on. Both the president and his party lacked experience in government— thanks in part to the KMT’s absolute refusal to relinquish meaningful policy-making positions to DPP members until it was forced to do so by the voters— and they made errors in policy and political judgment. One of President Chen’s greatest errors was overestimating the power of the presidency. The influence Taiwan’s Presidents Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-kuo and Lee Teng-hui derived from their status as chairmen of the all-powerful KMT masked the institutional weakness of the presidency, so it was only after several months in office that President Chen began to appreciate fully the constraints on his office.

However, Chen’s hubris should not be overstated. He recognized from the outset that he would need the support of legislators from the KMT and other parties to govern. His first premier, Tang Fei, was a KMT member who served as defense minister under Chen’s predecessor. Chen’s other cabinet appointments were drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of the KMT and non-partisans; barely 15 percent of his initial cabinet picks were DPP members. What Chen did not anticipate was the depth of the KMT’s frustration and rage at its presidential defeat. The newly-minted “opposition” party chose a strategy of obstructionism over compromise, with KMT legislators routinely launching blistering attacks on Premier Tang and KMT members of his cabinet.

The KMT vehemently rejected Chen’s early gestures of reconciliation and compromise, hoping instead to drive him out of office, or at least force him to turn over the cabinet to KMT control. But the KMT dared not use the one weapon available to it that might have resolved the conflict unequivocally: a no confidence vote. The party dared not face the electorate so soon after the seeing its chairman, Lien Chan, humiliated in the presidential race. Instead of voting to replace the premier, the KMT launched a petition in the legislature to recall the president. But polls showed little popular support for such a move, and the KMT and its allies eventually shelved the idea, belatedly discovering the value of a “rational opposition.” Still, the damaged unleashed in those early, chaotic months has yet to be repaired. To make matters worse, Taiwan’s mass media have treated Chen with extreme skepticism at best, and many media outlets are actively antagonistic toward the president.

All of these factors combined to create two self-defeating patterns within Chen’s administration. First, because many of Chen’s antagonists were driven less by coherent programmatic differences than by raw political enmity, the administration became paralyzed by an unrelenting fear that it would be ambushed. Any position Chen took was attacked, even if it was consistent with long-standing KMT positions. For example, the “pro-business” KMT countered a DPP proposal to reduce the length of the workweek with a plan that was even more generous to workers. Second, the administration fell into a pattern of crisis management, responding to daily emergencies rather than articulating long-term plans and strategies

Glimpses of Hope

Despite these difficulties, however, it is possible to discern a number of positive developments in the past twelve months. Above all, President Chen has led Taiwan away from the cliff on cross-strait relations. After mid-summer 1999, when President Lee Teng-hui described the relationship between Taipei and Beijing as a “special state-to-state relationship” relations between the two seemed headed for a crisis. Mainland rhetoric became even more heated in the run-up to the 2000 presidential, climaxing with the February release of Beijing’s White Paper on Taiwan policy and a speech in which Zhu Rongji pointedly warned the Taiwanese people not to elect a “pro-independence candidate” (by which he meant Chen Shui-bian).

In the event, however, Chen proved much less extreme on these issues than Beijing had anticipated. His victory speech and inaugural address both acknowledged the importance of peaceful cross-strait relations, and in those speeches he promised to take no steps toward Taiwan independence, so long as armed attack from the PRC was not imminent. In a speech given on New Year’s Eve, Chen went even further, offering his support for increased economic interaction between the two sides as a precursor to what he called “political integration.” Although Beijing has not acknowledged these overtures, they have won Chen some support in another important capital, Washington. In recent weeks Taiwan has won two important prizes from the US, including a robust arms sales package and a visa for President Chen to visit the US. Policy statements out of Washington suggest that under the Bush Administration, Taiwan’s relationship with the US will be stronger and more secure than it has been for decades.

Regardless of the reaction in Taiwan or the US, Chen’s concessions to Beijing have fallen far short of the Chinese leadership’s requirements. Beijing has repeatedly stated that President Chen must agree to the “one China principle” in order for dialogue between the two sides to resume, a condition Chen is unwilling to accept. A key reason for his reluctance is public opinion within Taiwan. While few Taiwanese hold out much hope of achieving de jure independence, most are wary of accepting Beijing’s preconditions for talks.

Although some PRC leaders, including foreign policy guru Qian Qichen, have offered “lite” versions of the one China principle (according to Qian’s formulation, “One China” means that there is one China, to which both Taiwan and the PRC belong), the Chinese government holds firm to its traditional view of one China (there is only one China, Taiwan is part of it, and it is the PRC) in the international arena. Thus, Taiwanese fear that if their government agrees to the “one China principle,” the gesture will be interpreted as an acknowledging the PRC’s superior status, and Taiwan will surrender its claim to a separate international existence. In short, despite weakening enthusiasm for independence among the Taiwanese people, political support for accepting Beijing’s terms is still lacking. Without such a consensus, Chen’s ability to make further overtures is limited.

Taiwan also made progress in certain policy arenas during President Chen’s first year in office. On the issue of arms sales by the US, Chen’s government sent clear signs well before the arms sales decision was announced that Taiwan would accept a package lacking the most provocative item on Taiwan’s wish-list, Arleigh-Burke class destroyers equipped with the Aegis radar system. While the reasons for the Chen administration’s retreat were complex, it did give the Bush Administration political cover for its decision to deny Taiwan the Aegis system. Chen’s administration successfully promoted long-overdue banking reform legislation, and the cabinet’s budget proposal passed with only minor tweaking in the legislature. The new government has made inroads against political corruption as well, and Taiwan’s politicians are at least debating important issues that were off the table during the KMT’s ascendancy, including sustainable development and balancing economic growth and environmental protection

The State of the Transition

The next big event on Taiwan’s political calendar is the legislative election scheduled for December 1, 2001. With a no confidence vote and early elections increasingly unlikely, the elections offer the first chance for breaking the political logjam that has plagued Taiwan for the past year. As the elections approach, political conditions in Taiwan are extraordinarily complex and volatile. With three significant parties competing, each of which contains factions and tendencies favoring an assortment of coalition options, the only certainty is uncertainty. Still, some features of the landscape are beginning to come into focus.

First, the DPP is a much more significant political actor in 2001 than it ever has been in the past. In fact, despite all the difficulties President Chen has faced in the past 12 months, the DPP still enjoys more popular support than its rivals. In electing Chen to the presidency, Taiwanese broke through an important psychological barrier. The DPP has held national office, and the world did not end. A DPP-led government is not only no longer unthinkable; it has become a reality. At the same time, the DPP is more unified and better organized than its opponents. In early April the party finalized its list of candidates for the year-end elections, ensuring maximum time in which to construct and carry out a coherent electoral strategy. Given Taiwan’s complex electoral system, the party’s preparations could prove decisive.

Second, the KMT is in disarray. With its support rate hovering around 10 percent, the old ruling party seems a shadow of its former self. Hanging onto its legislative majority will be extremely difficult; if it nominates enough candidates to hold the majority, it may fragment its limited vote share and end up even worse off than expected. As of May, the KMT is still working on its nominations list. In view of the large number of would-be KMT legislators — which includes former National Assembly and Provincial Assembly members as well as legislative incumbents — maintaining unity through this competitive process is a monumental challenge. At the same time, KMT legislators whose policy preferences and political loyalties are close to those of former president Lee Teng-hui are being courted by the DPP, which sees them as potential coalition partners. For many of them, party chair Lien Chan is leading the KMT in an uncomfortably conservative and pro-unification direction. Of course, the KMT still has an enormous war chest, but it is not clear how the party can allocate and use those resources in this battle.

A third important factor in the run-up to the 2001 legislative election is Taiwan’s changing political environment. The rise of the DPP and the birth of the PFP will make for an unprecedented level of party competition this year. Lien Chan’s weak performance in the presidential election showed that the KMT no longer can count on party mobilization to win elections. The KMT also will find it difficult to employ its traditional mobilizational practices, including vote buying. The Ministry of Justice is targeting political corruption, and most of Taiwan’s municipalities are under DPP control; thus, both central and local governments will be far more vigilant in enforcing the laws against these practices than ever before. At the same time, candidates from each of the parties will have to develop new issues and positions on which to campaign. No longer can the KMT rest its case on the claim that a DPP victory would threaten cross-strait stability. Although there has been little progress on this front under Chen Shui-bian, the long- predicted cataclysm did not come to pass when he assumed office a year ago.

Finally, it is very difficult to predict what role the People First Party will play in this election. The party itself is extremely flexible and focused on strategic considerations. How it will behave in the future is contingent upon a huge range of factors, each of which is, in turn, difficult to anticipate. How many candidates the PFP recruits and nominates, how well those candidates perform, whether or not it chooses to cooperate with other parties before or after the election, which party it chooses as its ally— all of these still are open questions. Only when we know the answers will be able to discern the contours of Taiwan’s future political landscape.

In conclusion, Chen Shui-bian walked a tortuous path in his first year as president of Taiwan. Nonetheless, it is possible to discern glimmers of hope as the year comes to a close. If the legislative elections in December do not yield a workable coalition, it may be very difficult for Taiwan to move forward politically or in the realm of public policy. On the other hand, if the legislative elections bring about a realignment of political forces, either in the form of a new party system or a realignment of individual politicians within existing party structures, Taiwan will have taken an important step toward a more mature political system.

You may forward this email as you like provided that you send it in its entirety, attribute it to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and include our web address (www.fpri.org). If you post it on a mailing list, please contact FPRI with the name, location, purpose, and number of recipients of the mailing list.

If you receive this as a forward and would like to be placed directly on our mailing lists, send email to FPRI@fpri.org. Include your name, address, and affiliation. For further information, contact Alan Luxenberg at (215) 732-3774 x105.

Become an FPRI member

E-Notes

Taiwan’s Perilous Transition

Chen Shui-Bian’s Annus Horriblus

Glimpses of Hope

The State of the Transition

Follow FPRI

FPRI Wishes to Thank its 2011 Partners Who help make all our programs possible.

FPRI Wishes to Thank its 2011 Partners
Who help make all our programs possible.