By Eva Cheng
Chen Shui-bian became Taiwan's second freely elected president on March 18. His victory has kick-started an unprecedented process that may force democratisation in Taiwan to be speeded and greatly increase popular pressure on Beijing to do the same on the mainland.
As a key leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Chen's success will make it impossible for either government to further delay tackling thorny issue of Taiwan's political relationship with mainland China.
However, in view of the Beijing regime's refusal to recognise the Taiwan population's right of national self-determination, the possibility of it mounting military actions to enforce its will cannot be dismissed. Beijing may seize upon any new moves by Chen in the direction of exercising that right to militarily intervene. It is equally likely that US imperialism would seize on such an event to also intervene.
From DPP's origins in the 1970s' street-fighting against the Kuomintang's (KMT) repressive rule, the party's leaders, including Chen, have not had the slightest idea about how to tackle the complex question of Taiwan's relationship with Beijing. Like most democracy activists in Hong Kong, who launched militant campaigns at around the same time, the Taiwanese activists focused on their immediate repressive rulers.
For quite a while, many naively believed that they could avoid tackling the key aspects of the "China question": Taiwan's political relationship with mainland China; the nature of China's "socialist" system; and its undemocratic ruling regime.
National identity
In Hong Kong by 1997, the influence of the democracy activists remained weak and politically marginalised by the departing British colonialists and the incoming Beijing bureaucracy.
However, the activists in Taiwan have achieved a much larger social base. They were able to translate the deep-seated resistance to the KMT's rule, which was nakedly dictatorial until the lifting of martial law in 1987, into strong electoral support — first individual activist candidates and, since its formation in 1986, for the DPP.
Despite interesting similarities, the problems that confront the democracy movement in Taiwan are different to those in Hong Kong. The question of whether Hong Kong should become an independent country after the British departure was never seriously contemplated. Hong Kong residents had never considered themselves a separate nation.
In Taiwan, the population has developed a separate national identity, despite the majority being descended from migrants from the mainland over the past few centuries. That sentiment was strongly reinforced by Japan's 1895-1945 colonial rule, as well as the KMT's brutal rule since 1945, backed by US imperialism in its efforts to contain communist China.
The aspiration of the Taiwanese people to determine their own affairs found expression in the electoral support for the DPP after its 1987 decision to advocate the right of self-determination for Taiwan's inhabitants. In 1991, it changed its party charter to incorporate the goal of building an independent "Republic of Taiwan". The DPP leadership reexamined these provisions on March 22 but decided to defer the decision until June.
The formation of the DPP, a high-profile act that violated the KMT's ban on other political parties, was just a small example of its founders' record of defiance. Another outstanding earlier battle involved the KMT's 1979 banning of the dissident magazine, the Formosa, which was published by these activists and used as an organising tool. The KMT threw most of those involved with the magazine in jail.
Seeking to turn this blow into an advantage, while these leaders were imprisoned, family members and even some of their defence lawyers ran in elections as proxy candidates and scored great results. In 1981, Chen Shui-bian, as one of the Formosa dissidents' defence lawyers, won a seat in the Taipei assembly. (Chen was also jailed for eight months in the mid-1980s for his political activities.)
Chen's role as a symbol for independence was even more prominent in the March election. Chinese premier Zhu Rongji's March 15 warning that Taiwanese voters "must be careful not to make the wrong choice, or (post-election) regrets would be too late" was a clear threat against voting for Chen.
Narrow victory
Despite Chen's victory, support for independence is far from overwhelming. Winning 39.3% of the votes, Chen did not outperform the DPP's electoral support of around 40% since 1993. KMT renegade James Soong Chu-yu, with 36.8%, was a close challenge. Given Soong's popularity, he could have easily won had he not suffered from a KMT smear campaign just before the election.
Soong, a KMT leading light for two decades who split away only a few months ago, drew support from the KMT base. The combined votes of Soong and the KMT's official candidate, Lien Chan, was 59.9%.
The rioters outside the KMT's Taipei headquarters after the election were mainly KMT supporters who accused the party of tricking them into voting for Lien and therefore allowing Chen to win.
The DPP controls only about one-third of the seats in parliament, with the majority still controlled by the KMT. However, a 1997 amendment gave the president greater powers, for example to appoint the executive head of the government without the approval of the legislature. This will give Chen greater room to counter the KMT's influence.
Although Chen won on an independence platform, it remains to be seen whether he will be a dedicated champion of Taiwan's independence. The faction-ridden DPP's ability to act as an united force remains in question. Its defining pro-independence charter has been repeatedly challenged from within since 1991.
The holding of a referendum on Taiwan's independence is not definite. Faced with intense pressure from Beijing to block this basic democratic process, Chen and the DPP leadership will need political guts to take that step.
A thorough debate preceding such a referendum would be useful for political education in Taiwan's population. The need for further democratisation in both Taiwan and the mainland would inevitably be raised. If satisfactory answers to these questions were presented, Taiwanese working people may perceive benefits in a common future with their counterparts on the mainland. Renewed support for unification with the mainland cannot be ruled out.
The DPP has been deeply divided over its policy towards China. One debate is whether the party should advocate "making use of" Taiwanese investments, already significant in China, as "leverage" to extract political concessions from Beijing. Since the forces within the DPP that favour appeasement with Beijing are becoming significant, the party may sacrifice the Taiwanese people's right to a referendum as a bargaining chip.
Moreover, to what extent Chen will implement the party's decisions remains unclear. During his 1994-98 tenure as Taipei's mayor, Chen repeatedly emphasised that he was the mayor of "all" Taipei's residents, not just DPP supporters. Chen has repeated this in relation to the presidency.
The DPP's lack of a clear social base and a clear class perspective is one of the party's major weaknesses. It arose from an anti-dictatorship movement, identified itself loosely with the "grassroots" and was strongly supported by the "Taiwanese" (rather than the post-1945 migrants from China who came with the KMT).
Until recently, it bitterly rejected the regime in Beijing, drawing no practical distinction between the mainland leadership and the people. Until the mid-1990s, the DPP denounced all KMT contact and discussion with Beijing as "traitorous".
Chen and the DPP's leaders are also keen to solicit the support of Taiwan's capitalists. In the last few years, they have started to target the small and medium businesses for support. With the KMT's further decline, it will become clear whether the DPP will reach out to the big capitalists as well; these capitalists would not be pleased with policies that favour the working class.
A worrying development is the DPP's moves to distance itself from its previous organising of mass actions and other extra-parliamentary mobilisations. The DPP's enthusiastic pursuit of support from US imperialism in recent years is further evidence of its questionable politics.