Government and Politics in Taiwan

Dafydd Fell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138187382
• eBook ISBN: 9781317285069
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Written by an experienced teacher and scholar, this new and revised second edition of Government and Politics in Taiwan introduces students to the big questions concerning change and continuity in Taiwanese politics and governance. Taking a critical approach, Dafydd Fell provides students with the essential background to the history and development of the political system, as well as an explanation of the key structures, processes and institutions that have shaped Taiwan over the last few decades.

Using key features such as suggestions for further reading and end-of-chapter study questions, this textbook covers:

• the transition to democracy and party politics;

• cross-Strait relations and foreign policy;

• electoral politics and voting;

• social movements;

• national identity;

• gender politics.

Having been fully updated to take to take stock of the 2012 and 2016 General Elections, the Sunflower Movement and new developments in cross-Strait relations, this is an essential text for any course on Taiwanese politics, Chinese politics and East Asian politics.

1 Introduction to government and politics in Taiwan

Introduction

Taiwanese politics are never boring. I often tell my students this in their introductory Taiwan politics class. Is this a fair statement or just a marketing slogan to persuade students to take my course rather than another from the bewildering range of possible courses at my university?

In the evening of 18 March 2014, a group of mainly students broke into Taiwan’s parliamentary debating chamber, occupying it until 10 April. This occupation, together with protests surrounding the parliament, became known as the Sunflower Movement. Rather than being violently evicted from parliament, this movement was able to push the government to put its proposed controversial trade deal with China on hold. For students in the UK used to harsh police treatment of protestors and governments completely ignoring protests, the Taiwan Sunflower Movement is an inspiring story. This then set off a chain of events leading the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party to suffer historic electoral defeats at the local (2014) and then national level (2016). While I had started off the first edition of this book describing the KMT’s landslide victories in 2008, the most recent national elections in January 2016 saw the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) not only win the presidency but also for the first time to win a parliamentary majority. This was Taiwan’s sixth direct presidential election and third change of ruling party through elections. The fact that these election-driven party turnovers have been so smooth and peaceful stands in stark contrast to the post-election violence seen in many other new democracies. As such, over the last three decades, Taiwan has gained a reputation as one of Asia’s model liberal democracies.

Such political developments would have seemed unimaginable when I had my first taste of Taiwanese electoral politics in 1989. At the time, I was a spotty teenager, in Taipei for a year as a Chinese language student. I arrived knowing next to nothing about Taiwan, as it had barely received a mention in my year one Modern Chinese Studies courses. Spending a year in Taiwan was entirely accidental. The violent crackdown on student protestors in Beijing, known as the Tiananmen incident, had temporarily made the People’s Republic of China (PRC) off-limits for UK students. That year, I witnessed not only Taiwan’s first multi-party parliamentary election but also its own version of the student democracy movement.¹ My experiences during that transitional year sowed the seeds of my own inexhaustible fascination with the Taiwan’s politics.

In 1989, it was still not clear whether Taiwan would remain a Singapore-style semi-democracy, where a change of ruling party was in effect impossible, or if it would move in the direction of a competitive multi-party liberal democracy. It is worth noting that in 1989 Taiwan was still ranked by Freedom House as only ‘Partly Free’.² The Republic of China’s (ROC) last dictator, Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), had only passed away the previous year and, although martial law had been formally lifted two years earlier, many aspects of the authoritarian era remained firmly in place. National level elections were still only supplementary, with the vast majority of both the Legislative Yuan and National Assembly seats held by parliamentarians that had been elected in China in the late 1940s and frozen in office. This meant that no matter what the election results were, the ruling KMT had a guaranteed majority. Civil liberties had improved, but there was not yet freedom of speech, as activists could still be arrested for advocating Taiwan independence. I still recall clearly the uncomfortable atmosphere when I touched upon such taboo subjects with university students.

After returning to the UK to complete my undergraduate education, I decided to write my dissertation on the KMT’s nation building project. Despite being at one of the largest East Asian Studies departments in Europe, I was struck by the paucity of English language material on contemporary Taiwan. At the time, the book that was particularly valuable and inspiring was Tien Hung-mao’s (田弘茂) The Great Transition: Political and Social Change in the Republic of China. Even today, Tien’s book remains one of the best guides to political life in the dying days of the martial law era. Although a rich literature on Taiwan politics has developed in the last two decades, no one to date has written a comprehensive post-transition version of The Great Transition. Therefore one of the motivations of this volume is to introduce modern Taiwanese politics from a comparative political science perspective and hopefully inspire readers to delve deeper into the subject.

I returned to Taiwan in 1992 and worked there as a buxiban (private language school) teacher through to 1999. This allowed me to witness that critical period of democratic transition and the subsequent early operation of democratic politics. Since 1999, I have often returned to Taiwan for fieldwork, first as a Ph.D. research student and then as an academic. On these visits I have observed the high hopes and fears of political change at the time of changes of the ruling parties. Looking back over the three decades since I first set foot in Taiwan, it seems hard to imagine how much and how rapidly the country has changed politically.

Why has this subject so captivated me? I am sure it must partly be the contrast between the glacial pace of political change and dull electoral campaigns that I have grown up with in Europe and Taiwan’s passionate and sometimes festival-like campaigns, along with the sense that democratic politics can make a real difference there. Thus, in this book I will try to tell the colourful story of Taiwan’s political change and continuity over the last three decades.

The emergence and growth of the study of Taiwan politics

In the mid-1980s, Taiwan politics was still a marginal topic in the field of Chinese studies and largely ignored by mainstream Western political science. In Taiwan itself, the lack of academic freedom and KMT party ideology meant that research and publication on Taiwan’s domestic politics was also severely underdeveloped. Initially, it was Taiwan’s economic achievements that caught the attention of social scientists around the globe. Three publications were to be critically important in introducing Taiwan’s political affairs to a wider readership. In addition to Tien’s The Great Transition, these were Thomas Gold’s State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle and Cheng Tun-jen’s (鄭敦仁) World Politics article ‘Democratizing the quasi-Leninist regime in Taiwan’. Gold’s volume on the political economy of the Taiwan miracle brought Taiwan to a wider audience by applying theories that had previously been used in Latin America, such as dependency, world systems and dependent development. One of the most influential scholars of Taiwan politics, Shelley Rigger, talks of Gold’s volume as having ‘awakened the field’.³ Cheng’s article was ground-breaking in being the work that made Taiwan’s politics visible to the broader comparative politics community by applying the transition framework to the Taiwan case. Its importance was reinforced to me when I surveyed a sample of Taiwan political experts on what was the most influential English language piece on Taiwan politics over the last two decades. The most popular response was Cheng’s work.

Since the publication of these landmark works, the field of Taiwan studies has expanded rapidly in terms of university courses, academic events and publications. Within the umbrella of Taiwan studies, Taiwan politics has been by far the most developed disciplinary field with its university courses being the most popular and common both on the island and abroad and, since the late 1990s, at least ten English language books have been published per year on the topic.^4,5 From my own experience as the editor for the Routledge Research on Taiwan series, politics book proposals outnumbered the combined total of all other disciplines. In the leading peer-reviewed Asian and Chinese studies journals, papers on political studies are by far the most commonly published articles focusing on Taiwan.⁶ Political science presentations have also been predominant in Taiwan studies seminars and conferences in Europe and North America. For example, in the annual European Association of Taiwan Studies conferences, the number of political research papers has often exceeded other disciplines. At the world’s leading politics conference, the American Political Science Association Conference, there are often more Taiwan panels than those on the PRC. Shelley Rigger’s comments reflect the current vibrancy of the field, ‘Given Taiwan’s small size and marginal position within Chinese studies, one cannot but marvel at the breadth and depth of social scientific research engaging the island’s history, economics, politics and society.’⁷

Why study Taiwan politics?

Clearly, Taiwan politics has become a popular subject of research over the last three decades. But why should you opt to study the subject instead of another regional politics course? As someone of Welsh descent, I do like to question why the politics of a country about the same size as Wales should receive such disproportionate scholarly attention. Shelley Rigger’s explanations for the vibrancy of the field are a useful way to approach the question.⁸

First, she suggests that Taiwan’s rapid political, social and economic change have made it a useful case for testing social science theories. The timing of Taiwan’s democratic transition coincided with what Samuel Huntington calls the ‘Third Wave of Democracy’.⁹ This has encouraged scholars to apply various democratization theories to explain Taiwan’s democratic change and compare its developments with other new democracies. In addition, there is still some scope for comparing Taiwan with China, particularly when examining their political histories. For example, exciting work is being done on comparative land reform and political persecution from the 1950s. However, the gulf between the two political systems today makes comparative research with other new democracies instead much more fruitful. Particularly prevalent have been studies comparing Taiwan with South Korea and Mexico. There is much scope for further research comparing Taiwan with countries with similar political systems in Latin America, Europe and Asia. In this volume I will discuss studies that place Taiwan in a comparative context and examine topics as diverse as welfare state development, political communication and party systems.

Second, Rigger stresses the ease of gathering political data in Taiwan. Compared to many of the countries we focus on at my university, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Taiwan is an extremely safe place to conduct fieldwork. Its modern public transport network, particularly the islandwide high-speed railway and Taipei and Kaohsiung metro systems, enhance one’s ability to perform such research. To a certain level, Taiwan’s politics can be studied without learning Chinese. In fact, because of the availability of political data in English, it is possible to take an MA in Taiwan Studies without using any Chinese language sources.¹⁰ Increasingly, the best scholars from Taiwan, regardless of whether they are based in Taiwan, Europe or America, are now publishing in English. Perhaps because so many Taiwanese politicians and officials have Ph.D.s and spent part of their career as academics, they are much more willing to be interviewed and have far more patience with academics than their counterparts in most Western countries. Taiwan’s online databases are also extremely user friendly. Getting access to Taiwanese political data is so straightforward that it is sometimes possible for a Ph.D. student to write their dissertation on Taiwan in Europe without ever visiting the island during their degree.¹¹ An academic studying Taiwan politics rarely fails to produce quality research due to a lack of data. Instead, a greater problem tends to be how to manage an excess of material.

A final reason Rigger suggests for the strength of the field is that the ‘scholarly community in Taiwan is extremely well developed and welcoming to foreign researchers’.¹² This hospitality applies not only to established scholars, but extends as well to MA and Ph.D. candidates, with my own students, when going there for research, noting Taiwanese academics’ hospitality and willingness to provide invaluable data and research guidance. Taiwan’s political liberalization has also enhanced the island’s research environment. The political taboos that I attempted to tackle in 1989 have long since been swept aside,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements for the first and second editions
• Note on Romanization
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction to government and politics in Taiwan
• 2 Authoritarian rule: the politics of martial law in Taiwan
• 3 Transition to democracy and democratic consolidation
• 4 Taiwan’s government and constitutional structure
• 5 Electoral politics: milestones, electoral systems and political communication
• 6 Party politics in Taiwan
• 7 Local and factional politics
• 8 Competing national identities
• 9 Taiwan’s external relations: balancing international space and cross-Strait relations
• 10 From Leninist corporatist state to vibrant civil society: the emergence and role of social movements
• 11 Is democracy working in Taiwan?: social welfare, political corruption and LGBT rights
• 12 Taiwan under divided government, 2000–8: the Chen Shui-bian era
• 13 Taiwan under Ma Ying-jeou and Tsai Ing-wen
• 14 A multitude of political miracles and future challenges
• References
• Index