This book explores the dynamics of party politics in Taiwan and cross-Strait relations over the past decade. While power transfer from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) back to the pro-status quo Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) in 2008 ushered a great leap in the development of cross-Strait relations in the following years, the DPP’s coming back to power in 2016 has reversed the trend and brought back a “cold peace” between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, reminiscent of the period of the Chen Shui-bian administration between 2000 and 2008. Social cleavage and partisan confrontation on the island have justified Beijing’s strategy of selective engagement with the two main parties within Taiwan. The state of cross-Strait relations, therefore, has become a by-product of volatile party politics on the island. In other words, to understand the dynamic party politics in Taiwan in terms of power relations between the two main parties and the nature of their political interaction (convergence or divergence) is a key to understand the volatile cross-Strait relations over the past decade and beyond.
What are the social foundations and institutional bases of Taiwan’s party politics? Is the two-party system sustainable given the periodic and dramatic shifts of power between the KMT and the DPP? Will party politics in Taiwan remain divergent or turn into the direction of convergence in the years to come? What are the similarities and differences of the two parties in their policies toward the Chinese mainland? What is Beijing’s strategy toward a changing Taiwan as well as its implications for cross-Strait relations? What are the economic and political logics underneath cross-Strait relations? This book examines these questions both retrospectively and prospectively for the sake of the general readers, while focusing on the period from 2008 to 2018 to ensure an in-depth and most updated study. Hopefully, it can satisfy the needs of both academic research and university education. Its research materials include official documents, intellectual discourse, survey data, and personal interviews.
Recent publications have shed lights on the abovementioned issues as well as others. Among them, Richard Bush’s Uncharted Strait (Brookings Institution Press, 2013) and Dafydd Fell’s Government and Politics in Taiwan (Routledge, 2012) are most relevant to this volume because of the time frame and specific subject they have covered.1 This book intends to make the following contributions to the area of Taiwan studies.
First, this volume observes party politics in Taiwan from the perspective of social landscape and institutional design. It highlights the accumulative cleavages in the society on the issues of economic growth and social distribution on the one hand and how to handle cross-Strait relations on the other hand. It also explores the impact of reform of electoral system since 2008 on party system. The book observes the sustainability of two-party system and the likelihood of convergent party politics on the island in a long run, despite currently asymmetric power structure of the majoritarian DPP and the weak KMT amid Blue-Green confrontation .
Second, it explores the impact of party politics on cross-Strait relations, comparing different mainland policies of the KMT and the DPP. While the 1992 consensus on the one-China principle accepted by both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the KMT has provided a political foundation for peaceful development of cross-Strait relations during the period of the Ma Ying-jeou administration , it has become an inexorable pitfall for the Tsai administration that tries to keep distance from the mainland and does not want to follow the KMT’s suit and accept the 1992 consensus or the one-China framework.2 Consequently, power shift between the two main parties in Taiwan has accompanied ups and downs of cross-Strait relations. This book tries to find out the logic underneath this periodic change: a strategic dilemma in Taiwan’s relations with the mainland caused by the island’s unavoidable attachment to the mainland economically but unwillingness to be part of China represented by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) politically.
Third, it examines Beijing’s strategy toward a changing Taiwan from the perspective of selective engagement. The development of cross-Strait relations over the past decade has been contributed to by the common efforts of the CCP and KMT, while the DPP played a marginal or negative role—whatever it is in opposition or in power. Although it is uncertain whether Beijing’s asymmetric engagement tactics can force the DPP to follow the KMT’s suit or create a greater partisan dispute within Taiwan, it is clear that Beijing has paid more attention to the so-called economic and social integrated development. Beijing’s selective engagement with Taiwan’s authorities in the two-level game is worthy of timely observation.
This book has seven chapters. Chapter 1, the introduction, proposes research questions on party politics in Taiwan and cross-Strait relations and presents research methodology and chapter structure. Chapter 2 discusses the evolution of party politics in Taiwan, which are shaped by both institutional design and social landscape. Taiwan’s electoral system started in 2008 is theoretically favorable to a two-party system and convergent party politics. Taiwanese society, however, is conducive to divergent party politics. While the KMT and the DPP have gradually reduced their difference in social and economic policies in order to get votes in the middle of the ideological spectrum, they are still divided on the issue of how to deal with the Chinese mainland. This chapter argues that one important precondition for a convergent two-party system is a power balance between the ruling and opposition parties through periodic power turnovers between them. Otherwise, the opposition party will be marginalized and therefore resort to extra-systematic confrontation against the ruling party, thus making political compromise and consensual party politics impossible. A balanced power relationship, however, cannot guarantee convergent party politics, as divergent party politics may result from other factors, such as social structure, institutional design, and traditional ideologies and policy platforms of different parties.
Taiwan’s electoral and party politics are not only reflective of social cleavage, but also constructive in shaping ordinary people’s party identification and national identity. Politics of identity is the subject of Chapter 3. Retrospectively, party identity among the Taiwanese people has experienced a great change since the early 1990s, particularly in the wake of the 2014 Sunflower Movement. From 2014 to 2017, the DPP identifiers overtook the KMT identifiers for the first time in the history of Taiwan’s party politics. Recently, more respondents identified themselves with the KMT rather than the DPP in the survey conducted by National Chengchi University’s Electoral Studies Center in the first part of 2018. This phenomenon deserves further observation, however. This chapter also investigates the evolution of national identity in Taiwan from both cultural and political dimensions. It challenges the methodological wisdom in measuring Taiwanese cultural identity by simply asking respondents to answer a three-choice question in survey: “are you Chinese, Taiwanese or both.” This questionnaire design contains two self-contradictory logics, the first two options assume Chinese and Taiwanese are mutually exclusive concepts, but the third option assumes they are conceptually inclusive. It also raises question to the method of measuring Taiwanese political identity by providing six options in the survey question, independence as soon as possible, independence later, unification as soon as possible, unification later, maintaining the status quo forever, and maintaining the status quo and deciding later, because the last option may still contain the respondents’ different preference to independence as opposed to unification. This chapter concludes that more sophisticated measures are needed to observe and understand the evolution of national identity in Taiwan.
Chapter 4 analyzes Taipei’s mainland policy under Ma Ying-jeou and Tsai Ing-wen, which has experienced significant change from one to another. During the Chen Shui-bian period the major dispute between the two parties was whether or not Taiwan should move to de jure independence through public referenda, “name rectification” (zhengming), and revision of its legal system. The Ma Ying-jeou period was featured by the so-called no unification, no independence, and no war, and the opposition DPP’s main concern was Taiwan’s eventual incorporation by the mainland through peaceful development of cross-Strait relations. In fact, the fault line between the two parties has been redrawn as regards to (1) how important is the mainland factor as opposed to other external factors (e.g., the United States and Japan) to Taiwan’s development and (2) to what degree Taiwan should make policy adjustment to accommodate the increasing influence of the mainland. While the outbreak of the Sunflower Movement opposing Cross-Strait Trade in Service Agreement revealed some people’s suspicion of losing Taiwanese economic and political autonomy amid the “great exchange, great cooperation, and great development” between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, the failure of the Tsai Ing-wen administration in managing a stable relationship with the mainland favoring T...