Chapter Twelve

Taiwan Politics and Leadership

John Tkacik

One of the main reasons that the United States is committed to aiding the defense of Taiwan, as a matter of both policy and law, is that Taiwan is truly one of the most dynamic and vibrant democracies in Asia. Of course, the United States also has extensive economic interests in Taiwan (where we exported 50 percent more in U.S. goods annually during the 1990s than we did to the People's Republic of China).¹ Moreover, the United States has a compelling strategic interest in denying control of the sea and air lines of communication around Taiwan to another major Eurasian power.² But the true American interest in Taiwan is to maintain the survival and success of Taiwan's democracy, which is one of the major accomplishments of America's postwar presence in Asia.

To understand the success of Taiwan's democracy, one must understand the nature of the dynamic political environment in which it thrives. Half of that dynamism is generated by four troubled decades of history from 1945 to 1988, during which deep interethnic antipathy festered and the native Taiwanese majority became increasingly insistent on self-determination and, indeed, independence from China and the transplanted mainland Chinese minority that ruled Taiwan during that period.³ The fact that several top leaders of Taiwan's political opposition until 1986 were accomplished lawyers⁴ who were trained to take advantage of constitutional processes gave the opposition movement a tradition of working within the electoral system and Taiwan's legislative structures. Another factor livening up Taiwan's politics emerged when Taiwan Independence advocates, formerly blacklisted and living overseas, were permitted to return to Taiwan and enter politics.⁵ Steeped in American, Canadian, and European traditions of healthy partisan but highly confrontational political campaigning, these returning exiles brought to Taiwan's electioneering an edginess never before seen in Taiwan--or in China for that matter. Throughout the long period of political repression in Taiwan (1945-1992), "Taiwan Independence" was the main rallying cry of the non-Kuomintang (KMT) underground opposition. Moreover, Taiwan independence was premised on the demand that Taiwan's ethnic majority, the nonmainlanders, should determine the future of their country.⁶

Another factor that exaggerates the dynamism of Taiwan's democracy is its complex legislative electoral system. A good case can be made that the electoral structure is conducive to competition among at least five separate political parties and that it rewards strong party organizations (as opposed to independent candidates).⁷

Another constitutional quirk of Taiwan's electoral system is that the president and the legislature are elected in different years and have different terms--a situation that both of the major political parties hope to resolve in the coming years.

As a result, the vibrancy and dynamism of Taiwan's democracy produced a minority president in March 2000, who had to struggle with a legislature dominated by the majority opposition. The result of that has been gridlock in policy, guerrilla warfare in government, and growing bitterness among the various ethnic groups that gravitate to one political party or the others.⁸

The Dirty Little Secret

Before getting into the complexities of Taiwan's electoral system, we must first admit a dirty little secret of Taiwan politics: Taiwan politics is ethnic politics. The major cleavages in Taiwan's political culture fall along ethnic lines, that is, mainlanders, Hoklo Taiwanese,⁹ Hakka Taiwanese, and, to a smaller extent, Malayo-Polynesian aborigines. It was this reality that made the March 18, 2000, presidential election a turning point in Taiwan's political history. It was a classic realignment election that changed the entire complexion of Taiwan's political dynamics. This ethnic dynamic--which the Taiwanese call Shengji Jingjie or the "Provincial Complex"--was strengthened in the December 2001 electoral fight for control of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan.¹⁰

For a rough idea of how this ethnic dynamic plays out in elections, let us consider the apparent results of the March 2000 presidential election.¹¹

The ethnic Hoklo Taiwanese in Southern Taiwan voted generally for Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Chen Shui-bian. The North Taiwan Hakkas and the entire mainlander population voted solidly for mainlander independent presidential candidate James Chu-yu Soong. Kuomintang (Nationalist or KMT) candidate Lien Chan generally got the Hoklo Taiwanese vote that didn't go to the DPP candidate.

In the 1996 presidential election, the KMT party nominee, former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui, won over 54 percent of the vote against 4 opponents, yet only 4 years later, despite an economy that was booming and a president who was still overwhelmingly popular, the KMT presidential candidate only managed to get 23 percent of the vote--a 31 percent drop from 1996.

In the 2000 election, former Taipei mayor Chen Shui-bian was the nominee of the pro-independence DPP candidate, and he received nearly 40 percent of the vote--19 percentage points above what the DPP candidate, Peng Ming-min, received in 1996.

Also in 2000, independent presidential candidate James Chu-yu Soong received 36 percent of the vote, 11 percentage points more than the combined vote in 1996 for the 2 mainlander-leaning candidates, Lin Yang-kang and Chen Lu-an, the ascetic and devoutly Buddhist mainlander who preached peace with mainland China.¹²

In 1996, Taiwan's incumbent president, the ethnic Taiwanese Lee Teng-hui, who had bemoaned the "tragedy of being Taiwanese" and called his own Kuomintang party "an alien regime" (wailai zhengquan), garnered most of the ethnic Taiwanese vote.¹³ Together with the DPP candidate Peng Ming-min, the pro-independence advocate (in fact, the father of the Taiwan Independence Movement), they claimed over 75 percent of the vote in Taiwan.

The mainlander vote, about 15 percent of the electorate, which went to Lin Yang-kang and Chen Lu-an in 1996, went to James Soong in the March 2000 balloting. Soong also had strong support among both ethnic Hakka and "good government" Hoklo Taiwanese, giving him an additional 21 percent of the vote.

James Soong, with a 1974 doctorate in political science from Georgetown University, was probably Taiwan's most astute politician and a keen reader of opinion polls. Moreover, he knew how politics works in Taiwan, especially ethnic politics. Soong was a former Government Information Office chief and later became secretary general of the Kuomintang. He was reputed to have been the architect of Lee Teng-hui's consolidation of power in the 3 years after the death of Chiang Ching-kuo.¹⁴ In 1994, when he ran for Taiwan provincial governor, his spoken Taiwanese was said to be so bad that President Lee Teng-hui himself campaigned on the stump with Soong smiling silently at his side. Soong won the gubernatorial election with nearly 56 percent of the vote¹⁵ and spent the next 4 years lavishing provincial money on Hakka districts throughout Taiwan in a highly successful effort to ingratiate himself to the Hakka voters--and to Taiwan's aborigines. Soong learned to speak the Hoklos' "Minnan" dialect without an accent, and by the end of his term he could carry on a conversation in the Hakka dialect.

In the March 2000 presidential election, Soong handily carried virtually all of Taiwan's Hakka districts, and Hakkas count for about 15 to 20 percent of the vote. The same goes for the aborigine vote: all went to Soong, except for pockets of voters in Taitung to Lien Chan.

So Who Are These People?

Hoklo are the Taiwanese whose forebears came from China's Fujian province in the century before last, and 18,000 of whose forebears were arrested and executed by Chiang Kai-shek's mainlander soldiers in the aftermath of the February 28, 1947, rebellion.¹⁶ The dead were 18,000 young Taiwanese men of the intelligentsia, Japanese-educated, who fought for the emperor in the war, whose families owned land and were merchants, and who rebelled against an unbelievably corrupt nationalist Chinese occupation of Taiwan from October 1945 to February 1947.

The Hakka are the same clannish and fiercely independent "Guest People" who migrated southward from ancient wars in North China during the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) and who suffered centuries of discrimination in imperial China's coastal Guangdong and Fujian provinces. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Hakka populations migrated to Taiwan, where their unusual clothes and language again made them objects of derision in the eyes of the majority Hoklo. The Hoklo pushed them off into the poorer, hilly lands where they were fated to become even more clannish and poor and generally came to look to the Japanese and later the KMT government to settle their disputes with Taiwanese.

Now numbering not quite a million, the aborigines are the Malayo-Polynesian peoples whom the vast migration of incoming Hoklo from the 17th to the 19th centuries pushed off the flatlands of Taiwan and into the mountains. The aborigines also looked to the Japanese and the KMT for protection against the Taiwanese.

The mainlanders were the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's defeated army and the legendary 2 million boat people who fled China in 1949-1950 after the Communist victory. But the February 28 rebellion began before these hordes actually arrived. In 1947, an incident was sparked when ragtag Nationalist customs troops beat up an old woman selling contraband cigarettes at the Taipei train station. Local boys accosted the hated outlanders, killed them, and unleashed pent-up hatred against the mainlanders. For several days, marauding Taiwanese gangs hunted down every mainlander they could find. Chiang Kai-shek dispatched three divisions of garrison troops to Taiwan, put down the rebellion, and arrested or executed not only the troublemakers but also the intellectual elites who could potentially cause trouble in the future.

While the 1947 executions touched most Hoklo Taiwanese families, the Kuomintang's 1949 Land Reform program had the additional economic effect of confiscating larger Hoklo landholdings and transferring them to poorer farmers, of whom the Hakka were arguably the biggest winners.¹⁷

It is not difficult to understand the ethnic rivalries and cleavages that color Taiwan's current politics. There are many other issues as well, such as cross-Strait relations and Taiwan independence, but these are a byproduct of the ethnic identity issue. Among urban voters, even more important issues are economic policies, environmental concerns--and staggering corruption.

Taiwan's Political Leaders

The preeminent political icon in Taiwan is former president Lee Teng-hui. He towers above everyone else, both literally (he is over 6 feet tall) as well as figuratively. Lee's tepid support for his own chosen candidate, Vice President Lien Chan, is believed to be the cause of Lien's ignominious distant-third-place showing in the March 2000 elections.¹⁸

Lee's visible happiness at Chen Shui-bian's victory, his emergence in June 2001 on the stage with President Chen to inaugurate the new "Northern Association,"¹⁹ a not-so-thinly veiled advocate of Taiwan independence, and the ensuing uproar in the press about Lee's strategy to split the KMT and form a new party to support President Chen's Democratic Progressive Party are all manifestations of Lee's unhappiness with the KMT. By August, the former president had presided over the assembly of the Taiwan Solidarity Union, which subsequently registered as a formal political party.²⁰ After an agonizing 2 months, the KMT disciplinary commission voted, on September 21, 2001, to revoke Lee's membership in the party.²¹

The KMT had hoped to sidestep this move, which they worried would only crystallize the KMT image among ethnic Taiwanese as a mainlander-dominated organization.²² But, in the end, Lee's incessant haranguing of the KMT as the source of Taiwan's political gridlock, as well as his attacks on the party for abandoning his Taiwan First political agenda, proved more than the mainlander elders of the party could take. The KMT top Hakka, Vice Chairman Wu Po-hsiung, lined up with the mainlanders against Lee, giving further evidence of the Hakka-Mainlander alliance that is the backbone of KMT support.²³

The other leader is James Soong. It was then-President Lee who managed to get James Soong--a mainlander--elected Taiwan provincial governor in 1994 in the island's first popular election. At the time, Soong was seen as Lee's acolyte. But by 1996, seeing that Soong was positioning himself for a run for the presidency, Lee took steps to weaken Soong's campaign by engineering the constitutional abolition of the Taiwan provincial government. Lee wanted to "Taiwanize" or "localize" (ben tu hua) Taiwan's political culture and rid it once and for all of its mainlander domination. This was a move that alarmed the old-guard mainlander factions in the KMT. In 1993, in fact, a sizeable chunk of the mainlanders left the party to establish the China New Party (CNP) dedicated to the proposition that Taiwan was part of China.

The move to abolish the Taiwan provincial government not only yanked the old rug out from under mainlander upstart James Soong but also was seen in mainlander circles as the thin end of the wedge for making Taiwan an independent state without even a figleaf of a connection to China.

Soong's exit from the political stage in late 1998 was not a pretty scene. Soong resigned and plotted his revenge. Soon after, Lee warned Soong in public not to "think only of himself"--it was a calculated insult. Lee froze Soong out of the contention for the KMT presidential nomination in 2000. Not surprisingly, Soong and like-minded mainlanders formed an independent presidential campaign that split the KMT. President Lee probably was happy to see the mainlanders go because the move would leave the KMT in his hands.

However, Lee had not considered Soong's popularity with the Hakkas and aborigines upon whom he had been lavishing public funds for 4 years. In the end, Soong was able to call in enough favors to attract away virtually the entire mainlander vote from KMT Lien Chan in the election, as well as most of the Hakkas and aborigines. He also attracted a good number of "good-government" voters in Taiwan's urban north.

Soong won 36 percent of the vote and after the election quickly formed his own political party, the People First Party (PFP). The PFP is made up of disaffected mainlanders in the Legislative Yuan, a number of top Hakka personalities, and a handful of prominent Taiwanese politicians who had suffered personal insults (some intentional, some not) arising from President Lee Teng-hui's imperious manner. A year and a half later, as the smoke cleared from the March 2000 presidential election, Soong remained the only real political leader in the PFP.

Unfortunately for the PFP, Soong seems to be all there is of the party. Pundits in Taipei say, "The PFP has no money, it has no candidates, it has no policies, all it has is Soong." Earlier, the PFP had hoped to be a refuge for ethnic Taiwanese and Hakkas from the Kuomintang who were fed up with KMT corruption and not likely to get renominated for legislative seats. KMT polls showed the party's share of the electorate shrinking. In the end, it was Lee's Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) that attracted the KMT castaways. This, apparently, was the ulterior TSU strategy all along. As one analyst in Taipei explained, the primary purpose of the TSU was to ensure that the PFP did not get any plausible legislative candidates, not that the TSU actually thought these candidates would win under the TSU banner.

The tactic worked. A much-ballyhooed KMT-PFP alliance that supposedly would pull together the so-called Pan Blue Army of the KMT and its splinter parties did not perform as well as some had hoped. Soong himself bemoaned the inability of the KMT to deal forthrightly with his party. Soong was desperate to claw votes away from the mainlander-heavy Taipei city, where on October 24, 2000, he slammed President Chen and former president Lee for "fomenting ethnic divisions." Still, Soong was wary of alienating his ethnic-Taiwanese constituency, and the next day he campaigned for PFP legislators in Eastern Taiwan by slamming President Chen and former President Lee, not for "ethnic divisions," but rather for "neglecting" the economic development of Eastern Taiwan.

What Is Left of the KMT

This leaves Lien and the Kuomintang. In March 2000, when all the votes were counted, Chen Shui-bian carried the ethnic Hoklo areas down-island (about 40 percent of the vote), while Soong got the mainlanders, Hakka, and aborigines (about 36 percent). Lien was left with the ethnic-Taiwanese votes controlled by the KMT party machine. In the end, it was only 23 percent.

Ironically, when Lien lost so badly, the mainlanders, who had not supported Lien in the first place, rioted for 2 days in Taipei. They demanded that President Lee resign as the party's chairman and turn the reins over to Lien Chan. Even the popular KMT mayor of Taipei, mainlander Ma Ying-jeou, joined the chorus calling for Lee's ouster, a move that did not endear Ma to Taiwanese. But it was a move that did make him popular with the mainlanders.

After several days, Lee finally resigned, leaving the shattered KMT--and its $3 billion (U.S.) war chest--in the hands of Lien Chan. In Lee's wake was left a KMT with a mostly Taiwanese rank-and-file, but a leader who was, and remains, desperate to bring back the schismatic mainlanders. Now, however, KMT chairman Lien Chan is surrounded by pretenders to the throne. The obvious successor, when Lien finally stumbles, is ethnic Taiwanese Vincent Siew, former premier and classic politician.

Siew will be challenged by the attractive, razor-sharp and self-confident Mayor Ma of Taipei, a former justice minister with a good reputation. But Ma was also the Brutus who thrust the unkindest cut of all into Lee Teng-hui in 2000. Aside from these two, there are no other potential leaders in the KMT hierarchy.²⁴

The DPP--Not an Organized Political Party

Finally, there is the Democratic Progressive Party. When I think of the DPP, I am reminded of Will Rogers, who said, "I don't belong to any organized political party, I'm a Democrat." The same observation can be made about Taiwan's DPP. Or, perhaps, the DPP is overorganized into at least five major factions and myriad smaller caucuses, forums, and mutual-admiration societies.²⁵ Two of the three living former DPP chairmen have already left the party; one wants to form an alliance with the PFP, and the other wants to reunify with the mainland. He is, of course, a Hakka.²⁶

The current DPP leader is, of course, President Chen Shui-bian. Unfortunately, unless one is the leader of the majority party in the legislature, being Taiwan's president is a troublesome occupation. And President Chen has been berated by a particularly vicious legislature.

Fortunately for Chen, Taiwan's public appears disgusted with the legislature. In fact, former President Lee was quoted as blaming all of Taiwan's political woes--and economic ones for that matter--on the legislature, and Lee specified that he was talking about the opposition parties. Moreover, Lee went on record as "wanting to cry after seeing what's happened to 12 years' work" as chairman of the KMT. President Lee spent 2 months actively campaigning for TSU candidates who were likely to help Chen form a "stable majority."

Clearly, the KMT has been stung by this. Lien Chan continuously charges that Lee and Chen Shui-bian have "played the ethnic card," and pundits acknowledge that Lee's ouster from the KMT has hurt the party among the Hoklo Taiwanese electorate. Although KMT Organization Chief Chao Shou-po insisted that "those who left the party under Lee's chairmanship are now returning to the fold," those returnees are mainlanders who voted for James Soong.²⁷ Their return to the KMT takes votes from Soong's PFP. On the other hand, DPP Secretary General Wu Hai-jen said, "the result of the KMT's "criticize Lee campaign" has been a hemorrhage of support in Southern Taiwan."

Coupled with a renewed attack on the KMT ill-gotten $3 billion (U.S.) warchest and the widely broadcast television clip of Chinese foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan interrupting and insulting Taiwan Economics Minister Lin Hsin-yi at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders-- conference on October 19, 2001, the KMT's ouster of Lee--and the increasingly pro-mainland complexion of the KMT--has eclipsed Taiwan's current economic depression as the dominant concern of the ethnic majority Hoklo in the upcoming election.

The DPP emerged as as the biggest party in the December 2001 elections, thanks, in part, to Lee's crossing over to bring his cofactionalists--the so-called Lee Wing of the KMT--with him.

Taiwan's Legislative Electoral System

The electoral structure for Taiwan's Legislative Yuan (LY) makes legislative elections a unique test of organization and precision electioneering. Although each electoral district elects several legislators, voters cast only a single vote for one candidate in a system called single vote, multi-seat balloting. This system, therefore, requires that parties nominate only the right number of candidates for the party slate in each district and then mobilize their voters with the aim of very precisely distributing the votes among each of the candidates.

Small political parties and independents with strong personal networks can still compete in this environment, but for a major party, the system means that tactical mistakes could cost it just enough votes to lose potential seats to give their opposition much-prized control of the legislature. Still, upsets are unlikely because minority parties are unwilling to risk losing their few seats by nominating enough candidates to obtain an overall majority.

Under Taiwan's complex legislative electoral system, 176 of 225 seats in the LY are elected by the voters directly. Each voter casts a single vote for only one candidate. Each of Taiwan's 31 electoral districts elects several representatives to the LY with the exception of four small constituencies that have only one legislator. This means candidates compete not only against candidates from the opposition parties but also against others from their own party. Complicating this system further, in election districts that elect four or more legislators, one of every four elected must be a woman, even if a male candidate receives more votes. After the quota of reserved female seats is filled by the top females who received votes, female candidates compete head-to-head with their male counterparts.

The remaining 49 seats in the LY are allocated to political parties that receive at least 5 percent of the popular vote. These parties divide the seats on the basis of the percentage of valid votes they receive. For example, if the Democratic Progressive Party wins 30 percent of the popular vote, then it gets 30 percent of the appointed seats. Eight of these 49 appointed seats are seen as representing the overseas Chinese community while the rest are considered at-large representatives.²⁸

Numbers Are Everything

To succeed in a Taiwan legislative election, each party must have a clear understanding before the election of approximately how many votes it will receive in each electoral district. This understanding helps determine how many candidates the party will run in that district. For example, if the KMT determines that in a 4-seat district of 160,000 voters, 80,000 will support the KMT, it is likely that it will choose to run only 2 candidates. If it runs three, it risks spreading its votes too thinly among its three candidates and risks losing all four seats. Conversely, if the KMT runs only 1 candidate in this district, that candidate might well win with 80,000 votes, but the party would give away another seat that it could have won easily. To maximize the number of seats, therefore, parties must closely examine each constituency and nominate candidates with extreme precision.

Gaining this understanding, however, is no small feat. During Taiwan's martial law era, the KMT used local police and identification card records to identify party members and others inclined to support KMT candidates in local elections. While this is no longer done, many mechanisms for voter mobilization used by the KMT remain in place. The rosters of farmer, fisherman, and irrigation associations tell parties (mainly the KMT) where potential blocks of like-minded voters reside. Township, village, and even neighborhood leaders also help the party organizations identify voters. Parties also employ political surveys to help them measure support in each area. Ultimately, a party's ability to predict the level of its support will go a long way toward ensuring it runs just the right number of candidates.

Mobilizing and Distributing Votes

Knowing how many votes a candidate receives in a given district and how many candidates to run is only half the battle. Because most districts elect several legislators, parties must not only run the right number of candidates but also must maximize distribution of the expected vote among all candidates. Successful vote distribution depends in large part on party ability to communicate with and mobilize voters. Local party leaders and middlemen, therefore, must communicate to voters for which of the party candidates they should vote. In rural areas, leaders of local political factions or social institutions such as farmers associations rally their members around specific candidates, making this job easier. In urban areas, however, mobilization and distribution of votes is becoming increasingly difficult because these organizations are less influential and voters are increasingly influenced by less manageable forces like the media.

Candidates also engage their own personal networks to help manage votes in certain areas. In fact, Taiwan's electoral system and personality-driven politics also make it possible for independent candidates with strong personal connections to win a seat. In Taoyuan county's 12-seat district, for example, a candidate needs only a little more than 8 percent of the vote to win a seat. This not only increases the competition for the major parties but also has allowed local faction leaders and even gangsters with deep pockets and strong networks to get elected.

Under Taiwan's Legislative Yuan election system, upsets are highly unlikely. Minority political parties will usually be unwilling to risk losing their few seats by nominating enough candidates to obtain an overall majority. Party nomination decisions are usually guided by past experience with voters and, therefore, the party will add and subtract candidates on the basis of slight shifts in support or improved capacity to mobilize.

However, in this respect, the December 2001 Legislative Yuan election may prove to be one of the most unusually dynamic in recent memory. The growth of the DPP and the emergence of the PFP since the last LY election have begun to undercut KMT historical organizational advantages, forcing it to try to reduce the number of candidates it runs. If the KMT cannot accurately measure shifts in support toward the PFP and DPP and cut its candidate roster accordingly, it may run too many candidates and pay the price of split votes and even more lost seats in December. Similarly, the DPP and PFP will have to be willing to gamble to take advantage of any cuts made by the KMT.

What this means is that every political party spends most of its effort trying to gauge just exactly what the support is for each of its candidates at the time of the nominations, which in 2001 came in March and April. The parties therefore rely on exhaustive polling, street canvassing, and in the final weeks, giving the party faithful very exact instructions on whom to vote for.

The December 2001 Election

The KMT's crushing defeat in the December 2001 midterm legislative elections was a major setback for Beijing, but it could have been worse. The KMT lost nearly half of its seats in the Legislative Yuan, while the DPP and its TSU allies increased the "Pan Green" representation by half. The election gave Chen a much-needed political boost, but not a mandate, so although the DPP became the largest party in the legislature (which has a total of 225 seats, 113 needed for control), it is still not the controlling party. The DPP (87 legislative seats, up from 66) ended the election with roughly the number of seats predicted in preelection estimates (80-85), but it was not the prime beneficiary of the KMT's collapse. At least 13 formerly KMT seats went to the infant pro-independence Taiwan Solidarity Union, giving the Pan Green a total of 100 legislative seats. But most of the KMT defections (the KMT dropped from 123 seats in the last election to 68 seats) went to the KMT splinter party (James Soong's People First Party), a group that did surprisingly well, ending up with 46 seats, versus expectations in the twenties. The PFP also gained several seats held by the pro-Beijing "China New Party," which lost 10 of its 11 seats in the December balloting. The KMT-PFP "Pan Blue" camp was therefore able to hold a razor-thin plurality of 113 and relied on various underworld-related "independent" parliamentarians to maintain a controlling margin. Both PFP and KMT views on cross-Strait issues tend to be similar: both draw large constituencies from people of mainlander descent who oppose Taiwan independence and others who are uncomfortable with Hoklo Taiwanese dominance in the political arena.

Rumors that the KMT hoped to woo James Soong back into the fold came to fruition on March 30, 2003, when the two parties announced a joint presidential Lien-Soong ticket for the March 2004 presidential election. But the personal animosities and political rivalries that exist among key players in both parties will make the marriage a rocky one. Upon the announcement of the joint ticket, Soong called for a "dual-leadership constitutional system" if the ticket wins in 2004.

But it is reasonable to assume that on cross-Strait issues the KMT and PFP will be natural allies in proposing deeper economic and transportation ties with China than President Chen or the Pan Green can stomach. The Pan Blue will also campaign on a One China platform designed to restrain Taiwan's continuing trend toward a separate identity from China. Should the Pan Blue KMT-PFP coalition win the presidency in 2004, it could arrest the pro-separation realignment of Taiwan's politics. A Green win in 2004 would likely continue the momentum for separation from China. Either way, Taiwan has a long way to go before reaching a consensus on its national identity.

Conclusion

The important conclusion to draw is that ethnic identity--and consequently, national identity--is a permanent feature of Taiwan's political landscape.

Because national identity is at the core of the cross-Strait tensions, Taiwan's political process will not permit an accommodation of China's demands that Taiwan become subordinate to Beijing. So unless China changes, there is no near- to mid-term prospect of any cross-Strait rapprochement.

But the other side of the coin is that the political dynamics are such that the majority ethnic Hoklo-Taiwanese inclination toward an outright declaration of independence will be restrained by the uneasiness of the minority Hakka, mainlander, and aborigines.

Finally, although we might have justifiable concerns about the judgment of Taiwan's leadership, on the whole they are well educated, intelligent, resourceful, and very responsive to the electorate, which is more than can be said for China's leadership.

Notes

 ¹From 1990 through 2000, Taiwan regularly imported 50 percent more in U.S. goods than the PRC. With the downturn in Taiwan's economy in 2001 and 2002, Taiwan's imports of U.S. goods fell to rough parity with the PRC. See U.S. International Trade Commission Web site, U.S. Trade Balance, by Partner Country 2001 in descending order of trade turnover (imports plus exports), accessed at <http://dataweb.usitc.gov/scripts/cy_m3_run.asp>. [BACK]

 ²John Tkacik, "Taiwan's Presidential Countdown: What does it mean for the United States?"China Brief 3, no. 9 (May 6, 2003), accessed at <http://china.jamestown.org/pubs/view/cwe_003_009_001.htm>. See also Nancy Tucker, "If Taiwan Chooses Unification, Should the United States Care?" The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2002, 22. Tucker notes that Chinese control of Taiwan would alarm Japanese military planners, giving China a presence along Japan's shipping routes and abutting its Ryukyu Island chain. Control of Taiwan would "in fact lead to a more significant projection of Chinese naval and air power beyond coastal waters. Unpublished statistics collected by Taiwan's ministry of national defense in June 2002 show that roughly 246,015 commercial ships transited Taiwan waters in 2001, and 259,086 civilian airliners traversed the Taiwan Air Defense Identification Zone the same year." [BACK]

 ³Sandy Huang, "Cross-Strait Ties: Surveys over the past year indicate that most Taiwanese favor the president's tough talk on China, but are cautious about opening direct links," Taipei Times, April 17, 2003, accessed at <http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2003/04/17/202383> ;. Taiwan's public opinion has shown a steady warming to independence since 1994 when generally about 10 percent of respondents in public opinion polls were "pro-independence" and 25 percent were "pro-unification." At the height of Taiwan's 2000 presidential election campaign, pro-independence respondents were over 28 percent of samples, but pro-independence has leveled off at about 17 percent since then, with pro-unification sentiment running at 16 to 24 percent. See Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) tabulations, accessed at <http://www.mac.gov.tw/english/english/pos/9112/9112e_1.gif>. Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council cites independence-unification surveys conducted by six separate agencies that appear not to ask precisely the same questions of respondents. Some agencies get consistently high sentiment for independence over time, while others get lesser interest. When the results are overlaid on a line graph (as appears at the MAC Web site), this phenomenon is visible. A more interesting poll was one conducted by Sun Yat-sen University in December 2000 that showed 57.8 percent of Taiwan elementary school pupils identified themselves as Taiwanese only, while 23.7 percent said they were both Chinese and Taiwanese. Only 6.4 percent of the children said they were Chinese only. See "Zhongshan Daxue Diaocha Xianshi: Qi Cheng Xuetong Ji Ju Zhengdang Pian Hao" ("Sun Yat-sen University Poll shows 70 percent of school pupils have partisan leanings"), China Times, December 10, 2000. [BACK]

 ⁴Chen Shui-bian and Frank Chang-ting Hsieh, now respectively Taiwan's president and mayor of Kaohsiung, were the primary defense attorneys in the Martial Law Trial of the Kaohsiung Eight defendants. Also leading lights in the opposition movement then were Chang Chun-hsiung, now Taiwan's premier, and then-imprisoned Lu Hsiu-lien, now Taiwan's vice president. [BACK]

 ⁵These include former U.S. citizen Mark Tang-shan Chen, former president of the World Federation of Taiwanese Associations, now magistrate of Tainan county; George Tsan-hung Chang, former chairman of the World United Formosans for Independence, now mayor of Tainan city; U.S. citizen Wang Hsing-nan, arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 for the attempted assassination of Taiwan's vice president Hsien Tung-min, now member of the Legislative Yuan; former DPP Chairman Peng Ming-min, former chairman of the graduate school of political science at National Taiwan University, who was jailed on sedition charges in 1964, paroled, and in 1970, escaped by fishing boat to Japan, Canada, then the United States, where he taught international law until his return in November 1992. Among other prominent Taiwanese opposition politicians with U.S. training are DPP legislator Parris Chang and presidential aide Hsiao Mei-chin. [BACK]

 ⁶Alan M. Wachman discusses the independence issue in several chapters of his Taiwan, National Identity, and Democratization (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 79-87. Victor H. Li engages 15 Taiwanese and mainlanders in a discussion of Taiwan independence in his Future of Taiwan, A Difference of Opinion (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1980), 47-64. Shelly Rigger, however, points out advocates of Taiwan independence split from the Democratic Progressive Party in 1997 in frustration over the growing DPP embrace of the idea that Taiwan is already independent. See her Politics in Taiwan, Voting for Democracy (London: Routledge, 1999), 160. [BACK]

 ⁷John Fuh-shen Hsieh and Emerson M.S. Niou, "Salient Issues in Taiwan's Electoral Politics," Conference Group on Taiwan Studies Working Papers in Taiwan Studies, 1995, accessed at <http://www.la.utexas.edu/research/cgots/Papers/03.pdf> [BACK]

 ⁸This effect was somewhat dissipated by the convincing victory of the Democratic Progressive Party in the legislative of December 2001, but several media reports indicated that the elections ironically resulted in a deeper ethnic polarization of Taiwan's electorate. See Deborah Kuo, "KMT and PFP Decide Not To Take Part In Chen's Proposed Alliance," Central News Agency, December 6, 2001; and Stephanie Low, "KMT committee director abandons post," Taipei Times, December 8, 2001, accessed at <http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2001/12/08/story/0000114876>. [BACK]

 ⁹"Fu Lao Ren" in Mandarin or "Fujianese," who themselves can be further subdivided into those whose ancestors came from the Fujian cities of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. A rivalry between the Hoklo from Quanzhou and those from Zhangzhou persists to this day. See also John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier 1600-1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), which describes in detail the local rivalries between Hakka, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou Chinese during the 18th-century rebellions against the Qing dynasty. [BACK]

¹⁰This chapter was originally written in November 2001 but has been updated. For a summary of the election results, see William Kristol, "Embrace Taiwan," The Washington Post, December 4, 2001. [BACK]

¹¹There is very little published survey data on voting patterns of Taiwan's ethnic subgroups. These conclusions are drawn from conversations with scholars at the Election Study Center of National Chengchi University in Taipei. [BACK]

¹²Chen Lu-an also served as defense minister under President Chiang Ching-kuo and is the son of the late Chen Cheng, Taiwan's vice president under Chiang Kai-shek. [BACK]

¹³Siba Ryotaro, "Lee Teng-hui's Candid Talk With Shiba," Zili Zhoubao (Independence Post Weekly), May 13, 1994, 4, interview with Li Teng-hui in Taipei, date of interview not given. [BACK]

¹⁴See Zhou Yuguan, Li Denghui de Yi Qian Tian (Lee Teng-hui's First Thousand Days 1988-1992), (Taipei: Maitian Publishing, 1993), 145-147, 165, 180-182. In the power struggle between the KMT mainland faction and the emerging Taiwanese "Mainstream Faction" (Zhuliu Pai), Soong proved to be a stalwart Lee Teng-hui supporter and worked tirelessly to engineer Lee's election as KMT chairman. [BACK]

¹⁵This anecdote comes from private conversations with sources in Taiwan. The author has not been able to track down a published citation. [BACK]

¹⁶The most comprehensive history of the February 28, 1947, incident is found in George H. Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 254-330. [BACK]

¹⁷See John F. Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province? (Boulder: Westview, 1990), 37-41; and Tun-jen Cheng and Stephan Haggard, Political Change in Taiwan (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1992), 190-194, for a discussion of the similarity in Hakka and mainlander voting patterns vis-à-vis Min-Nan (Hoklo) preferences. [BACK]

¹⁸John Tkacik, "How A-bian Won," China On Line, March 26, 2000, accessed at <http://www.chinaonline.com/features/eyeontaiwan/eyeontaiwan/cs-protected/c0 032652.asp>. [BACK]

¹⁹Lin Mei-chun, "Chen-Lee alliance steals the limelight," The Taipei Times; see also Xia Zhen, He Rongxing, and Yin Naiqing, "Beishe Chengli, Li Bian tongtai Chuji, Lien Song Didiao Huiying" ("North Association established, Lee and Chen launch attack on stage together, Lien and Soong play it down"), China Times, June 17, 2001. [BACK]

²⁰Liu Tiancai, "Li Zhengtuan Zhengming 'Taiwan Tuanjie Lianmeng'" ("Lee Teng-hui Political Group rectifies its name as 'Taiwan Solidarity Union'"), China Times, July 25, 2001; Bu Mingwei, "Taiwan Tuanjie Lianmeng Cheng Jun" ("Taiwan Solidarity Union moves its troops"), Commercial Times, July 25, 2001. [BACK]

²¹Lee did, in fact, midwife the emergence of the Taiwan Solidarity Union, a KMT splinter that supported the DPP and which won 6 percent of the vote and 13 seats in the Legislature in the December 1, 2001, elections. [BACK]

²²In several campaign stump speeches for TSU candidates in November 2001, Lee complained bitterly that a vote for the KMT would "let a flock of alien rulers once again plunge Taiwan back into dictatorship" ("fouze jiu hui rang yipi wailai zhengquan tongzhi, rang Taiwan zaidu hui dao ducai"). See "Li Denghui: Rentong bi Tongyi Geng Zhongyao" ("Lee Teng-hui, 'Recognition is more important than unification'"), China Times, November 19, 2001. In a separate stump speech in Hualien, Lee said he knew how the legislative elections would turn out, but he could not discuss it. He said that if "the election turns out good or bad, it will affect Taiwan's stability for the next twenty or thirty years, and if it's bad 'even I will kill myself,' this election is that important." See "Li Denghui Da Yuyan Zhengju Jiang Bian" ("Lee Tenghui makes a bold prediction, the political scene will change"), China Times, November 18, 2001. [BACK]

²³"Guomindang Zhongchanghui Beicha Li Denghui An, Wu Boxiong: Hao Zhong hao san" ("KMT Central Standing Committee will review Lee Teng-hui Case, Wu Po-hsiung says, 'we met as friends, let's part as friends'"), China Times, September 27, 2001. [BACK]

²⁴As of September 2002, Mayor Ma Ying-jeou was locked in a serious electoral battle with DPP candidate Lee Ying-yuan for the Taipei mayoralty. It is an election he should have had no trouble winning. But the DPP's Lee seems certain to have an "iron vote" of at least 43 percent. The highly popular former President Lee Teng-hui campaigned for Ma Ying-jeou in 1998, describing his as a "New Taiwanese" (Xin Taiwanren). In the 2002 election campaign, however, the former president has attacked Ma and supported Lee Ying-yuan. It remains to be seen whether the former president can claim the additional 8 percentage points needed to put the DPP's Lee over the top. [BACK]

²⁵The DPP's major factions are "New Tide" (Xin Chaoliu), led by Chiou I-jen and Wu Nai-jen; "Justice Alliance" (Zhengyi Lianxian), led by President Chen Shui-bian; "Welfare State" (Fuli Guo), led by Kaohsiung Mayor Chairman Frank Hsieh; "Formosa" (Meilidao), of which Vice President Lu Hsiu-lien was one of the most prominent members; and the "Independence Alliance" (Taidu Lianmeng), led by Tainan County mayor Mark Chen. For a discussion of how the factions work in election campaigns, see Joyce Huang, "DPP selects election candidates," Taipei Times, April 2, 2001, accessed at <http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2001/04/02>. [BACK]

²⁶Hsu Hsin-liang ran against Chen Shui-bian for the presidency when he failed to gain the DPP presidential nomination for himself in the 2000 election. [BACK]

²⁷Chao resigned as KMT organization chief after the party's losses in the December 2001 legislative elections. Chao bemoaned the influence that local KMT had accreted to the detriment of the national party organization and said the fact that the KMT has urged the electorate to "vote for the person, not the party" indicates that the party lacked confidence in itself. Chao also admitted that because of the dependence on traditional vote captains and vote-buying politics, the DPP government's continual crackdown on vote buying, meant electoral losses for many KMT candidates. See Stephanie Low, "KMT committee director abandons post," Taipei Times, December 8, 2001, accessed at <http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2001/12/08/story/0000114876>. [BACK]

²⁸The author is indebted to the American Institute in Taiwan for this analysis. Taiwan's Central Election Commission certified the results of the legislative elections on December 2, 2001: DPP received 38.67 percent of the vote and won 87 seats; the KMT received 30.22 percent of the vote and won 68 seats; the PFP received 20.44 percent of the vote and won 46 seats; the Taiwan Solidarity Union won 5.78 percent of the vote and took 13 seats; Independents received 4.45 percent of the vote and took 10 seats. The pro-China "New Party" got less than a half percent of the votes and won a single seat in Quemoy. See Ziyou Shibao (Liberty Times), December 2, 2001, 2. [BACK]