Two untold obstacles to Taiwan’s democratic consolidation beyond China’s ambition
Two untold obstacles to Taiwan’s democratic consolidation beyond China’s ambition
WRITTEN BY SANHO CHUNG
7 February 2024
Having gone to the polls again on 13 January for another general election, Taiwan, since its first direct presidential election in 1996, has been widely recognised as a vibrant democracy. Meanwhile, there is also a strong consensus that the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) political claim toward Taiwan remains a constant concern of Taipei’s democratic prospect among scholars of democracy and observers of the region. However, challenges to this new-born democracy are indeed both external and internal. Two underexplored yet important internal threats to Taiwan’s democracy are the entrenchment of nationalist polarisation and the dilemma of local autonomy.
Nationalist polarisation entrenched by partisan disagreement
One underlying challenge to Taiwan’s democratic stability is the burgeoning nationalist polarisation caused by the major political powers’ divergent views toward the country’s future sovereignty since the onset of its democratisation. One key factor stabilising power alternations in a democracy is the “agree-to-disagree” mutual tolerance between main political blocs in the country. In traditional democracies, the key dispute between parties only rests on the values that simply affect the direction of policymaking but rarely the country’s future sovereign status.
However, in the case of Taiwan, because its democratic movement went hand in hand with its undone nation-building movement, the fundamental dispute between the initial democratic opposition (i.e. the Democratic Progressive Party/DPP or the pan-green) and the authoritarian incumbent (i.e. the Chinese Nationalist Party/Kuomintang/KMT, or the pan-blue) after democratisation became whether Taiwan should maintain its political connection with China in the future. Given their different views toward Taiwan’s political future, recognising the political “status quo” became their only common ground, which allowed for the mutual tolerance necessary in a democracy. Retaining the official title of the Republic of China (ROC) and its constitution was unnegotiable for the pan-blue camp but has since been adopted by the Tsai administration and the moderate green as “ROC Taiwan”. Concerning the country’s political ties with the PRC, the bipartisan agreement that “neither side of the Taiwan Strait is subordinate to the other” allows the pan-green camp to emphasise Taiwan’s de-facto separation from Mainland China.
Local organisations and elected offices as well, with their discretionary budgets and deeply penetrated social networks in the community, have been hotbeds for local actors to take part in vote buying or any other clientelistic exchanges in elections.
The bipartisan “status quo” recognition has worked as a cornerstone of Taiwan’s democratic development over the last two decades. However, according to Aram Hur and Andrew Yeo’s study on nationalist polarisation in Taiwan and South Korea, the mutually exclusive nationalist visions in Taiwan have hindered its democratic system from further consolidating by fuelling illiberal competition. In Taiwan, one recent symptom of illiberal competition can be exemplified by the recent weaponisation of the Recall Act from 2017 to 2021. After it was loosened in 2016, the relaxed recall clause, which made it easier to challenge elected officials' seats, was weaponised by radical flankers on both blocs for revenge against salient politicians. Since the enactment of its amendment in 2017, six elected officers (one pan-blue and five pan-green) at central and municipal levels have been targeted for recall by their opponents, and three of them (one pan-blue and two pan-green) were eventually unseated after a successful recall election.
This mounting polarisation could erode Taiwan's democracy in two ways. First, the long-term blue-green competition has worn out some voters and, therefore, is giving rise to populism. After three power alternations during the democratic period of Taiwan, a portion of swing and young voters has increasingly gotten tired of the endlessly tumultuous blue-green disputes. This weariness toward traditional politics can be reflected by the reverberating “both blue and green suck (藍綠一樣爛)” slogan maintained by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), the latest third force in Taiwan which declares itself as the “white” bloc and aspires to provide new political alternatives beyond the blue-green dichotomy.
The aforementioned voters are mainly fatigued by the corruption trials against officials from both parties and are also numbed by the DPP’s “China threat” card when there has been a lack of new salient cues on the “China threat” in recent years after the end of protests in Hong Kong in 2019. These voters are more bothered by domestic economic issues, such as the economic repercussions of economic decoupling with China under the DPP administration and the US-China trade war, as well as various unsolved economic adversities encountered by youngsters, including the widening inequality, rising property prices, as well as the dissatisfaction about low early-career salaries. These disappointed electorates either just abstain from politics or turn to demagogues who can cleverly address these grievances by claiming instant solutions to Taiwan’s economic bottleneck through closer economic ties with China while diluting the public’s alertness to China’s territorial ambitions.
The polarisation also weakens people’s resilience to disinformation. The Democracy Report published by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden shows that disinformation in Taiwan has been rated as one of the most serious globally in recent years and far more severe than in other countries. The influx of disinformation is not meant to really convince recipients. Rather, it is intended to manipulate public opinion at critical junctures by overwhelming recipients so that they will no longer trust anything. The increasingly aggressive and extreme accusations between opposing political parties are doing a huge favour to these disinformation initiatives by effectively discrediting both sides. As a consequence, the entrenchment of such partisan distrust is corroding the base for mutual tolerance in Taiwan's democracy.
The dilemma of local autonomy: How to respect the locals while preventing malpractices?
Besides the nationalist polarisation nurtured by the divergent views on Taiwan’s political future, the second overlooked root of the democratic challenge in Taiwan comes from the dilemma of local power limits. To understand the dilemma, it is first important to realise that the political landscapes in Taiwan at the central and local levels are drastically different. At least as of today, even though the DPP has controlled both the presidency and the legislature majority, the DPP is locally weak: it only has five mayors and controls two first-tier local (special municipalities, cities, or counties) councils out of 22 in Taiwan. This vote incongruence in Taiwan indicates the divergence of voters’ concerns in different levels of elections: while the national elections are more about ideology-based appeals, local elections tend to be about the proximity to local communities and connections with interest groups.
Since the opening up of democratic competitions, local autonomy has been a tricky issue from the perspective of democratic consolidation in Taiwan, as both its enlargement and confinement can be troublesome.
Over the last decades, China has tried hard to sway election outcomes in Taiwan, including the one in January, by extending its influence to grassroots social actors, such as elected village heads, agricultural association leaders, and temple managers, whose activities are not as strictly regulated as central officials. Leveraging the ingrained cultural ties between Mainland China and Taiwan, Beijing has been offering these actors low-cost or free tours to China in the name of civic exchanges (trade, rite, kinship, etc.). Behind the reported itinerary, “secret activities” for persuasion purposes are usually contained in these trips.
Local organisations and elected offices as well, with their discretionary budgets and deeply penetrated social networks in the community, have been hotbeds for local actors to take part in vote buying or any other clientelistic exchanges in elections. Even though the norm of electoral integrity is taken very seriously in today’s Taiwan, it is still common to see vote monitoring and prosecutions against vote buying in local elections. In this regard, the preservation of local autonomy could retain leeway for these electoral malpractices.
What if the central government tried to confine these behaviours through re-centralisation? Deepening top-down controls over lower local authorities and actors could be problematic in several ways. Besides limiting grassroots participation in local governance, Hsu Yu-ming Wang’s recent research on Taiwan’s 2010 Municipal Reform as a re-centralisation initiative shows that centralisation would also hurt both the quality and quantity of public services. Upper-level authorities are factually less responsive to local demands than lower-level ones, who have more domestic information and make policies from a more local perspective. In the face of these overlooked challenges, Su Huan-chih, a former DPP magistrate of Tainan County, is advocating for the reinstatement of district-level elections in cities/municipalities as a potential solution to those aforementioned predicaments.
Faith in Taiwan’s democratic process
These issues will surely not be solved shortly and will probably linger for a certain period beyond regular election cycles. However, what surely helps the situation is the political enthusiasm of electorates in Taiwan who still have strong faith in the democratic system as a tool to find a way out, even though it might take a detour, as denoted by the consistently high turnout (always more than 70 per cent except 2016) over the last eight general elections in Taiwan.
Without their constant attention to politics beyond the election cycles, demagogueries, even though there is a perfectly designed political system, will always find room to take root. Without people’s dedication to their hometown, the discussion on the solution to the local autonomy dilemma will never be an organic and effective one. Besides how the election outcomes affect cross-strait relations, perhaps what we should also look at in Taiwan’s democracy is how much dedication the Taiwanese still have to their system regardless of the difficulties.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Sanho Chung is currently a Visiting Scholar at the National Chengchi University, a Dissertation Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, and a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Arizona. His research interest rests on the Politics of East Asia (esp. Taiwan and Hong Kong), clientelism, and local government arrangements. Image credit: Flickr/曾 成訓 (cropped).