Democracy on Trial: Social Movements and Cultural Politics in Postauthoritarian Taiwan

1. Democracy’s Dawn: “Quiet Revolution” in a National Crisis

Democracy’s Dawn: “Quiet Revolution” in a National Crisis The first three years of the 1990s marked an important moment for democracy to take root and form in Taiwan. In 1990, thousands of college students protested in Taipei, demanding immediate reelections for the Guomindahui (the National Assembly) and Lifayuan (the Legislative Yuan), the alienated two national parliaments. With the democracy movement peaking, the next two years in a row, for the first time in history, people on this island were able to exercise their rights and cast votes to elect all members of the Lifayuan and Guomindahui. The previous bodies of the Lifayuan and Guomindahui were assembled in China in 1947 before the Nationalists (Kuomintang) were defeated by the Communists. Since the Kuomintang was put in exile on Taiwan, representatives in these two bodies had never been reelected, with only additional seats for the voters in Taiwan. Given this system of oligarchy in place for almost four decades, the major goal of the political insurgency through the 1980s was to demand the establishment of a representative system. The lifting of martial law in 1987, though it was celebrated in a sense, was to a large extent symbolic when it came to the issue of constitutionally protected political and civil rights. Throughout the last few years of the 1980s, the Kuomintang, now an internally conflicted collective, still refused to accept those demands for democratic reform—for example, free speech and popular voting for national-level representatives and officials . The total elections of both parliaments in 1991–1992 and a first-ever general vote for president in 1996, therefore, have to be considered a series| ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE | SIX | SEVEN | 26 | DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL of crucial political processes in which state power was dramatically transformed . This moment of “popular sovereignty,” according to government documents, was far from a “natural” realization of liberal democracy.1 Democratization was a complicated process, insofar as the idea of sovereignty in a postcolony is concerned. Taiwan’s democratization in the 1990s was intertwined with an identity crisis, in which postwar Kuomintang’s rule was contested about its alienness. A variety of “nativisms” arose to the political and social forefront, entwined in a politics of identity and indigeneity . This nativist politics also attracted the PRC’s intervention with this new state. Both form within and from without, the state power was taking intensive fire. This chapter examines the Kuomintang’s rule in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Many questions regarding the social and political transformation in that period are still worth further exploring here to investigate the course of democracy afterward: Why was the ruling Kuomintang forced to open the political process when it was still strong enough to maintain one-party rule? What was the role of the political insurgency and opposition in democratization? What was the relationship between democratization and nationalism? And finally, how has the process of democratization affected the social struggle in the years since, and vice versa? To this end, I first investigate the state in crisis in the 1980s and how the weakening Kuomintang fought back in the process of democratization in a new cloth of nativism under the leadership of Lee Teng-hui. I examine various political and social forces that struggled for leadership in this process. New nationalist politics served as the ideological underpinning of the new state, and at least to a degree upheld the moral and intellectual leadership of the Kuomintang state under President Lee Teng-hui, while a transnational bourgeoisie was consolidating yet still too weak to lead. Popular Sovereignty For a long time, scholarship on Taiwan in various disciplines has depicted postwar Kuomintang rule as coercive, seamless, and economically effective. Thomas Gold, in his now classic book State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, asked two questions about “Taiwan’s miraculous growth with stability.”2 First, how did Taiwan attain and sustain such high DEMOCRACY’S DAWN | 27 economic growth rates? Second, how did Taiwan maintain political and social stability in its economic takeoff? For Gold, explaining this successful “dependent development” in Taiwan “must start with the Nationalist party-state.” By assuming so, Gold thus suggests a model of developmental state,3 namely, an outward-looking state—relatively autonomous from any social groups—that had carefully and effectively “led sustained economic development through several crises and maintained stability in the bargain.”4 Moreover, Allen Chun, a critic of postwar nation...