Unsung heroes and their actions

Democracy in Taiwan

Taiwan is an amazing place. Located on the island long known as Formosa, Taiwan is just over a hundred miles east of the Fujian coast of China. Mountains roughly bisect the island. Earthquakes, resulting from this location along the Ring of Fire, along with increasingly powerful typhoons are frequent natural phenomena which periodically affect daily life and test any regime’s ability to respond to crisis. The northeast coast has stunning scenery with dramatic cliffs and one major deep water harbour at Suao while the west is more open with mud flats along much of that coast. This 2019 photograph is Taipei, including Taiwan 101, for several years the tallest building n the world.

Taiwan is far from a homogenous place where political parties exist simply because of differences in economic policy, for example. When I spent an extended time in Taipei in 2003, a Taiwanese friend at the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto embassy the United States has operated on the island since shifting diplomatic recognition of the Chinese government from Taiwan to Beijing on 1 January 1979, explained three distinct segments of the island’s population from her perspective. She believed that history helped explain the politics. The aboriginal population on Formosa, roughly 500,000 of the 23.6 million residents, date back for two millenia, arriving from southeast Asia via the archipelagic areas of the Philippines and Indonesia. My friend argued the majority of population—probably in excess of 12 million—are Taiwanese, people who emigrated from Fujian or other parts of southern mainland China with the great trading migration that began in the thirteenth century as vast groups of Chinese moved throughout South East Asia. These Taiwanese form the bulk of the island’s population and were the subject of horrendous discrimination at the hands of the final group, the Guomingdang, (KMT or Nationalists) who fled the Civil War in the 1940s. Scholars estimate 2.2 million Guomingdang supporters arrived in the late 1940s. Z. Jiang, H. Mi, and Y. Zhang, 'An estimation of the out-migration from mainland China to Taiwan: 1946-1949', China Journal of Population Science . 1996;8(4):403-19.The Guomingdang brought wealth (the National Palace Museum in Taipei, for example, has the bulk of the China’s museum cultural assets flown out to retain their custody as the Communist victory became more apparent in 1948-49) from the mainland, initially retained a sense of their personal identities based home villages on the mainland instead of on Taiwan, and ruled the island with an iron fist under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters.

In the late-1940s, Taiwan was an insignificant backwater when the Guomingdang (often known in the United States as the KMT) arrived with desperation as the Communists increasingly seized control over the mainland in the waning years of the Chinese Civil War. Few histories at the time recognised the resident Taiwanese when as if it were an vacant island ready to serve as a launching pad for retaking the mainland, a fanciful idea that characterised too many Americans’ understanding of Taiwan and ‘China’ in the pre-1970s. Few in the United States recognised the nature of Chiang Kai-shek’s arrival establishing the Republic of China. (That is a much longer story, however, for further exploration.) Relevant for today is that the Guomingdang ruled Taiwan as authoritarians between 1947 and 1988, and as a democracy only gradually after that.

Chiang Kai-shek prohibited serious competition in politics. Taiwanese faced massive descrimination in the society. Schools taught could not teach in Taiwanese even though the native population spoke this language, using instead Mandarin. According to conversations with Taiwanese, the military on the island under the KMT restricted promotion to those whose families fled in the 1940s, dramatically undermining Taiwanese equity in the armed forces. While this may have originated from concerns about so-called Fifth Column activities, it set up a political environment where the Guomingdang were at the top of the ruling class to favour their interests. In short, the perception by many on the island was that being from a family which arrived prior to 1947 was a distinct disadvantage with long-term discriminatory effects.

In 1987, perhaps the least lauded transformational figure of Asia, Chiang Kai-shek’s heir and son, Chiang Ching-Kuo, ended marshal law in this society. Long the leader of the secret police that enforced his father’s discriminatory, respressive policies, Ching-kuo confronted a radically different context for Taiwan after the United States withdrew diplomatic relations in 1979. The elder Chiang had strong support in the United States dating to World War II and those who talked of him as if a Christian democrat, a buttress against Maoist godless Communism in China; Taiwan actually was a ruthless dictatorial government from 1949 through his death in 1975. Ching-kuo chose to open the political system gradually in Taiwan to allow far greater participation, establishing a viable democratic, competitive, participatory political system. Without the genuine democracy he created, Taiwan would be far less relevant for many in the United States today. Ching-kuo had the foresight to see that prior to his death in 1988.

The initial beneficiary of these changes was President Li Deng-hui who had grown up a Taiwanese under Japanese imperial rule, conditions that began with China surrendering Formosa to Tokyo in 1895. Li spoke better Japanese than Chinese and had a profound understanding of why he saw the island as distinct from the mainland. His 1996 election as president coincided with Beijing’s missile tests off the north and southern tips of Taiwan to deter the Taiwan citizens from holding an open vote; it also led President Bill Clinton send two carrier battle groups to the area near the island to remind Beijing of the U.S. obligations under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 of our displeasure with their menacing behavior. Li won the presidency as a KMT candidate in this first open vote for the position.

In 2000, a three way race saw the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) take the Taiwan presidency under Chen Shui-bian as president with a plurality but not a majority of the popular vote. It was a transformational moment for Taiwan as the pre-1947 Taiwanese felt their long oppression lessen under a DPP president for two terms. The Chen administration limped to its conclusion with him facing corruption charges by 2008 but he raised nationalist sentiment and sustained a competitive political environment with the institutions—formal and informal—of democracy. A Guomingdang regime under Ma Ying-jeou succeeded the DPP from 2008-2016, providing sustained democratic governance before the DPP retook the presidency in 2016 and 2020. Taiwan has shown more than two decades of flourishing electoral competition between thriving political parties at the highest level of the political system.

Taiwan also has competitive politics within the Legislative Yuan (LY), its version of a Congress. The DPP and the Guomingdang, along with several other smaller parties, vibrantly represent their supporters in the legislature and in various local offices. In short, Taiwan has a functioning competitive electoral system that is vibrant!

Many more aspects of a competitive, sustained electoral system developed in Taiwan after Chaing Ching-kuo’s choice in 1987. Fully two generations accepting press freedoms, fiscal accountability, a more welcoming role for those of the pre-1947 population, and enthsiastic voters willing to move from one party to another to align with voters’ policy desires are just a few.

The mid-term local voting today saw the revival of the Guomingdang, a party thought on ropes after losing to DPP President Tsai Ing-wen in her 2020 reelection race. The DPP, headlines noted, took a drubbing when resulted arrived, retaining only 6 county and city contests out of 22 nationally. The Guomingdang victories spurred President Tsai, halfway through her second presidential administration, to resign as head of her Democratic Progressive Party, meaning she will be less directly accountable for candidates selected in the next election cycle. This is no guarantee the Guomingdang will win the presidency in 2024 but it is a manifestation of a system where the parties respond to their constituents as much as pursuing ideological attacks while hiding behind rhetoric of hate and disaffection.

Taiwan has a long way to go to sustain the dream of many of its citizens for sovereignty and a perpetual democracy solely in the hands of the people on the island. Without the choices taken so far, however, it likely would have been relegated to the same cycle of failed transitions which plague much of the world. The individuals who took brave choices supporting Taiwan on this path may be lesser known in the United States but represent true unsung heroes so far in Taiwan’s evolution as a noteworthy democracy. FIN