Taiwan's Presidential Politics: Democratization and Cross-Strait Relations in the Twenty-First Century (review)

Despite the rapprochement between the United States and the People's Republic of China (PRC), an information and telecommunications revolution, the growing popularity of liberal (representative) democracy, and the sudden end of the Cold War have combined with purposive anti-authoritarian democratic social movements to reshape Taiwan's political landscape. In this lively context, global and regional powers, political parties out of power, and nongovernmental organizations have promoted their own competing, preferred futures for Taiwan.¹ As a result, the overt and covert tactics once used by China and the United States to influence Taiwan's society and government have lost much of their earlier effectiveness. In contrast to their counterparts during the years of Taiwan's greatest isolation, a democratized younger generation in Taiwan that is politically conscious and globally aware has a larger and potentially more receptive international media audience for their concerns than Jimmy Carter or Deng Xiaoping could have imagined in 1979.

Illustrated with ten figures and fifteen tables and documented with 367 chapter endnotes, Taiwan's Presidential Politics: Democratization and Cross-Strait Relations in the Twenty-First Century is edited by Dr. Muthiah Alagappa, who at the time of writing was Director of Studies at the East-West Center in Honolulu. Most of the chapters originated as papers presented in August 2000 at the East West Center's "Taiwan 2000 Presidential Elections Workshop" (p. xi).² Responding to the election of President Chen Shui-bian, the workshop proposed to analyze how democratization in Taiwan had enabled the defeat of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) and the election of Chen, the candidate of the once outlawed Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), on March 18, 2000. What Alagappa has to say in this book may already have proved useful to government officials in both Washington and Beijing. It will also be of value to policy makers in Taipei, Tokyo, and elsewhere, and to scholars and practitioners of nongovernmental politics in East Asia and the United States.

Alagappa's introduction, "Presidential Election, Democratization, and Cross Strait Relations" (pp. 3-47), summarizes the nine chapters that follow and underscores the main agreement among the book's contributors that "Chen's victory and the KMT's defeat mark the crossing of important thresholds both in Taiwan's democratization and in the transformation of the cross-strait conflict" (p. 6).

What has changed in Taiwan? And what has changed in Beijing-Taipei Washington relations? Readers of the "Anatomy of an Electoral Earthquake: How the KMT Lost and the DPP Won the 2000 Presidential Election" by Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution will get a lively account of the events leading up to the surprising election victory of DPP standard-bearer Chen Shui-bian in March 2000 (pp. 48-87). Dominated by the Kuomintang from 1945 to 2000, Taiwan's "semipresidential" political system has experienced yet a further expansion of liberalization with the change in the presidency and the change in the party in power. Despite his enthusiastic treatment of the subject matter, however, Diamond offers a caveat: "But the mass public remains ambivalent in its attitudes towards democracy, and the political system has yet to find a mode for operating Taiwan's semipresidential system effectively in the absence of a legislative majority for the ruling (presidential) party" (p. 83).

Chapter 2, "Democratic Consolidation in the Post-KMT Era: The Challenge of Governance," by Yun-han Chu of National Taiwan University (pp. 88-114), refers to four waves of constitutional reform, noting that "current constitutional arrangements are not designed for the scenario of divided government" (p. 111). But is a presidential or semipresidential system Taiwan's best alternative? One might look beyond France (p. 92) to the history of semipresidential systems...