Successors to Chiang Kai-shek
Upon Chiang Kai-shek’s death in April 1975, his vice president, Yen Chia-kan (Yen Jiagan), became president. Yen, however, was a caretaker president. Chiang’s eldest son, Chiang Ching-kuo (Jiang Jingguo), who headed the KMT and had a base of support in the military, the police, and the intelligence organizations, wielded real political power. Yen understood the political reality, and he and Chiang worked together. When Yen’s term ended in 1978, Chiang was elected president. In the meantime, he made important decisions as premier.
Chiang Ching-kuo, CCK to his friends, had been sent to the Soviet Union in his youth. He joined the Communist Party there, supported Leon Trotsky, and married a Russian woman. Those credentials hardly constituted an appropriate background for running a country that was on the verge of democratizing, nor were his jobs working with his father or his bases of support. But Chiang understood that Taiwan needed to become democratic to survive its diplomatic isolation, to finally heal internal ethnic ill will, and to continue its rapid economic growth.
Chiang was also a man of high standards. He launched an anticorruption campaign that was taken seriously, especially when he jailed some venal top-ranking officials, including his relatives. He forced austerity on the government and set rules that made the government transparent and open to Taiwan’s citizens. At times he used edicts to more quickly push the pace of democratization and good government.
In December 1978 U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter announced without prior warning that the United States would end its formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan and normalize relations with mainland China. His move was a severe shock to Taiwan, and many of its people felt betrayed and angry. Moreover, the move led other countries to rush to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favor of those with the mainland, thus further increasing Taiwan’s political isolation. However, Chiang kept Taiwan from overreacting and pursued democratization even more relentlessly. He negotiated with the opposition and arrived at understandings that in 1980 made possible Taiwan’s first competitive national elections. He also supported the Taiwan Relations Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in early 1979, which preserved nondiplomatic relations with the United States.
Chiang oversaw another legislative election in 1983 and the formation of a real opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in 1986, which was followed later that year by Taiwan’s first-ever two-party election—the first in Chinese history. In 1987 he ended martial law and the ban on travel to mainland China, a move that would lead to personal and economic contacts across the Taiwan Strait for the first time since 1949.
Relations with Beijing improved, though Chiang rejected an offer by Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-p’ing) in 1982 to resolve the “Taiwan issue” by using the “one country, two systems” formula that was being devised for the return of Hong Kong to China. He argued that it would make the Republic of China a local government. Chiang also had to contend with a communiqué between the administration of U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan and Beijing in August of that year in which the United States agreed to reduce arms sales to Taiwan, with the ultimate aim of ending them. Few other countries were willing to sell weapons to Taiwan, so it needed U.S. weapons. As a countermeasure, Chiang launched a program to build Taiwan’s own jet fighter plane, called the Indigenous Defense Fighter (IDF). The first plane was completed in 1988 and forthwith went into production. It helped Taiwan maintain air superiority over the island and in the Taiwan Strait. The IDF, however, was extremely expensive to build.
Meanwhile, Chiang put Taiwanese persons into positions of importance in the KMT and the government. One of them was Lee Teng-hui (Li Denghui), a Hakka, whom Chiang made his vice presidential running mate in his successful bid for reelection in 1984.
For some time Chiang had been in poor health, and he died in January 1988, before the end of his second term. He was seen to have brought integrity to Taiwan’s politics and to have democratized the country. He had launched what became known as Taiwan’s “political miracle” as he furthered its economic miracle. The respect with which Taiwan’s citizens viewed Chiang lasted into the 21st century, with public opinion polls indicating that most people continued to believe that he had been Taiwan’s best president.
Lee Teng-hui assumed the presidency following Chiang’s death, according to the constitution. He was also Chiang’s chosen successor. However, because Lee was Taiwanese (though Hakka), he was not trusted by the mainland Chinese old guard. They tried to block his accruing too much power by supporting a rotating party leader. James Soong, a young (by Chinese standards) mainland Chinese who was secretary-general of the KMT, took Lee’s side and warned that obstructing Lee’s assumption of political authority would bring chaos and send the wrong signal to Taiwan’s economic partners.
Soong won the day, and in July 1988 Lee was officially elected chairman of the party at its 13th Congress. Lee formed a new cabinet, which for the first time included a Taiwanese majority. Lee also advanced new rules for conducting party business, thereby further democratizing the party. He picked Lee Huan, a mainland Chinese, to be premier.
Meanwhile, in May 1988, farmers took to the streets to protest low prices for their products. More than 500 people were injured in the protests. Subsequently, other groups engaged in street politics, to the tune of 150 public protests a month. Taiwan supported the student movement in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, though not in any tangible way. Students in Taiwan announced support for their counterparts in Beijing. President Lee talked to them in public and listened to their views.
In early 1990 Lee was elected to a second term as president—though he was briefly challenged by Lin Yang-kang (Lin Yanggang) and Chiang Wei-kuo (Jiang Weiguo; Chiang Kai-shek’s second son and Chiang Ching-kuo’s half brother). In 1991 President Lee terminated the Temporary Provisions, which had superseded the 1947 constitution and increased presidential power in light of the Chinese communist threat. Thus, with the retirement of the “elder parliamentarians” (those representing districts on the mainland or replacements made by appointment) in the National Assembly and the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan held its first nonsupplementary National Assembly election, which helped push democratization another big step forward. Lee’s KMT won the election, though it did not perform as well as it would in legislative elections the following year.
Meanwhile, President Lee had to deal with serious factionalism in the KMT. Some members of the party thought that Lee was promoting Taiwanization too much and disagreed with his policies toward an independent Taiwan. A number left the party to form the Chinese New Party, subsequently renamed the New Party.
Lee also had to cope with an economically booming mainland China. His policy in dealing with Taiwan’s business community, which had been enlarging its investments in and trade with the mainland, was to encourage those businesses to pursue opportunities in Southeast Asia instead—which he called his “go south” policy. After 1990 Lee also had to deal with the mainland’s growing military power. In 1992 Lee was able to improve Taiwan’s military situation when he negotiated offers to purchase advanced fighter planes from the United States (F-16s) and France (Mirage 2000-5s). Taiwan bought aircraft from both countries.
In 1994 Lee supported James Soong when the latter ran for the position of governor of Taiwan, the first direct election for that office. Soong won easily. Lee at the same time pushed through a constitutional amendment providing for a directly elected president. Thereupon Lee decided to run for another term and was reelected in 1996 in what was the first direct election of a top leader in any Chinese entity in history. Lee and his running mate, Lien Chan (Lian Zhan), won a majority of the votes against three other sets of candidates.
In 1995, before the election, Lee traveled to the United States to address a gathering of graduate-school alumni at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, where he had received a doctorate in 1968. The trip was a resounding success, although the U.S. Department of State tried to marginalize Lee’s visit in an effort to avoid annoying Beijing. Lee’s visit and his good press in the United States nonetheless angered Beijing, whose leaders saw Lee as trying to legally separate Taiwan from mainland China. Shortly thereafter the People’s Liberation Army conducted threatening missile tests in the Taiwan Strait. More-provocative tests were conducted in 1996, during Lee’s reelection campaign. In reaction, U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton dispatched U.S. warships to the strait, leading to a potentially explosive face-off with mainland China. The conflict-laden situation abated, but not before it drew attention to Taiwan’s status as a serious problem in U.S.-China relations.
At this time Lee engineered more flexibility in Taiwan’s foreign policy by putting emphasis on informal contacts with other countries and regional and international agencies. He also increased Taiwan’s foreign aid to establish or keep up relations with developing countries. Those efforts yielded results, but they were hardly enough to stem the tide that favored mainland China over Taiwan in their growing contest for influence in the world.
In 1998 the KMT performed well in local elections, including the Taipei mayoral race, in which the party’s candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, defeated Chen Shui-bian of the DPP with Lee’s help. As Lee’s term in office neared an end in 1999, he angered Beijing again when he called for state-to-state relations, thus suggesting that Taiwan was sovereign and should therefore be independent. Some said that Lee’s action was a response to comments President Clinton had made when he was in mainland China the previous year that appeared to refute Taiwan’s right to seek a separate future. In September 1999, shortly before Lee left office, he had to contend with a severe earthquake, centered in the middle of the island, that killed some 2,400 people, injured thousands more, and caused massive property damage.
President Lee was known in Taiwan as “Mr. Democracy” for the positive political change he oversaw. He certainly demonstrated that he was a skillful politician and was able to do much for Taiwan while he was in office, even though relations with mainland China were strained during the latter part of his presidency, and the mainland’s rise was increasingly difficult for Taiwan to cope with.
Taiwan since 2000
The Chen Shui-bian presidency
In March 2000 Chen Shui-bian of the opposition DPP won the presidential election. This was a watershed event; the KMT had been in power for more than half a century. Some hailed the election as the final step in Taiwan’s process toward democratizing and establishing majority rule. Others called it a fluke.
The latter view was supported by the way Chen won. Pres. Lee Teng-hui had backed his vice president, Lien Chan, for the KMT’s presidential nomination. However, a third candidate, former Taipei governor James Soong, had the best preference-poll numbers—far ahead of Lien’s and Chen’s. Hence, Soong ran as an independent and might well have won the election except that during the campaign Lee and other top members of the KMT accused Soong of having absconded with party funds when he was secretary-general of the KMT. This accusation hurt his reputation badly. Soong was also at a disadvantage by not having a political party and not having sufficient funds to run his campaign. In any case, Soong, running as an independent, ended up splitting the conservative vote.
Chen ran a highly effective campaign, appealing to the Fukien Taiwanese, women, young people, the poor, and those who believed that Taiwan should be legally separate from mainland China. In addition, he was charismatic. Soong, also a consummate politician, won only a small percentage less than Chen in the final vote tally. Soong won more votes from all of Taiwan’s ethnic minorities (mainland Chinese and Hakka and Indigenous peoples) and from women. Hence, Chen was elected with less than half of the popular vote, which was not considered a mandate by many observers. The DPP also lacked a majority in the legislature, which meant a divided government and a difficult job ahead for Chen.
Chen nevertheless started out his term well, with his approval poll numbers ranging upward to 70 percent. However, his efforts to build an effective ruling coalition failed, and he resorted to playing ethnic politics. One of the president’s tactics was to create a political crisis by canceling work on a nuclear power plant that the previous legislature had authorized. Concern about electricity shortages, a general paralysis in government, and a loss of confidence in the business community contributed to the economy’s fall into recession in 2001.
In 2001 Lee Teng-hui left the KMT and formed the Taiwan Solidarity Union, which aligned itself with Chen. James Soong set up the People First Party and aligned it with Lien, who by then was heading the KMT. In legislative elections held that year, the DPP won a plurality but not a majority of seats in the legislature, while Soong’s party made bigger gains (though from a smaller base). Thus, President Chen still did not command a majority in the legislature, and political gridlock became worse.
In 2004 President Chen and his vice president, Annette Lu, were reelected in a highly controversial election. Lien and Soong had teamed up to run against them, and the polls leading up to ballot day showed the opposition duo winning. However, less than 24 hours before the polls were to open, both Chen and Lu were shot while campaigning near Chen’s hometown. The wounds were minor, but Chen ordered the police and the military to remain at their posts, which kept them from voting (it was assumed that most would have voted for Lien and Soong). Chen and Lu were also helped by the sympathy vote, and the pair won by a razor-thin margin.
The opposition charged that the election had been stolen. Political paralysis got even worse. Meanwhile, Chen’s people, who had perceived that they would be out of power soon, increased their efforts to cash in on their positions, and corruption, already bad, worsened dramatically.
During his first term in office, Chen had antagonized Beijing with calls for Taiwan’s independence in order to solidify his support base, the Fukien Taiwanese. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the United States, engaged in war in the Middle East, did not welcome Chen’s provocation. U.S. Pres. George W. Bush, who until then had been a close friend of Taiwan, now made caustic comments about the Chen administration and regarded Chen as a loose cannon and Taiwan as no longer a loyal ally. Because of domestic political gridlock, purchases of American arms were held up by Taiwan’s legislature at a time when mainland China continued to put more missiles in place in an attempt to intimidate Taiwan. Moreover, the mainland attracted Taiwan’s businessmen with investment and trade opportunities. The cumulative effect of these developments was to discredit the Chen presidency.
Late in Chen’s second term, Shih Ming-teh—a former DPP chairman known as “Taiwan’s Nelson Mandela” for having served longer in prison than any other DPP member during KMT rule (1966–77 and 1980–90)—organized mass public protests against Chen, citing his poor governance and massive corruption. Indictments of a large number of Chen administration officials, including Chen’s wife, made the situation worse for the president. Chen’s public approval poll numbers fell into single digits.
Chen ended his presidency in disgrace. The hallmarks of his administration were extreme corruption, worsening ethnic relations, and deteriorating relations with mainland China and the United States. He also did serious damage to his party, the DPP, and its leadership. Some even feared for the future of the party.
After Chen left the presidency, he was not allowed to leave Taiwan. In late 2009 he was sentenced to life in prison and fined $6.13 million after he and his wife were convicted of embezzlement, receiving bribes, and money laundering involving some $15 million. Chen’s friends and relatives provided evidence against him in court, as did legal authorities from the United States and several other countries. Taiwan’s High Court subsequently reviewed the case and reduced the sentence, but Chen remained in prison. Though Chen still had a significant following, the conviction signaled that Chen’s influence in the KMT had ended.
By going on hunger strikes, complaining of ill treatment in prison, and appealing his sentence, Chen remained under media scrutiny in ensuing years. This worked to the advantage of the KMT and hurt the DPP.
The Ma Ying-jeou presidency
In 2008 the KMT won both the presidential and legislative elections by big margins. Ma Ying-jeou, a former mayor of Taipei and once the minister of justice, was elected president. Ma, who had a law degree from Harvard University and a reputation for being the cleanest of Taiwan’s political elite, was respected and popular. During the campaign he had pledged good economic growth, better ethnic relations, clean government, and cordial relations with mainland China and the United States.
The U.S. government was indeed very pleased with Ma as president, principally because he reduced tensions in the Taiwan Strait by pursuing cordial relations with Beijing rather than provoking its leaders. In the process, the Taiwan Strait was downgraded from its former status as the foremost flash point in the world (defined as the place where a conflict between two powers—in this case the United States and mainland China—might involve the use of weapons of mass destruction). Beijing was also pleased, and it set in motion policies to dramatically improve relations with Taiwan.
However, in 2009 Taiwan fell victim to the worldwide recession, which caused negative economic growth on the island. Also that year a devastating tropical cyclone, Typhoon Morakot, hit Taiwan, and nearly 500 people were killed or listed as missing. Ma espoused the position that responding to the tragedy was largely local governments’ responsibility. The public, however, was ultimately dissatisfied with the response of Ma’s government, and Ma’s popularity plummeted as a result.
Meanwhile, the opposition, in a state of shock and disarray after its two election defeats in early 2008, began to make a comeback under the leadership of Tsai Ing-wen, a former vice-premier. She moderated DPP policies, improved party morale, and oversaw some wins in local and replacement elections.
In 2010 Ma’s approval ratings rose in public opinion polls, buoyed by very impressive improvements in Taiwan’s economic growth. Ma was able to negotiate the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement with mainland China, which reduced tariffs on the mainland’s and Taiwan’s exports to each other. It was the first in a series of economic and financial agreements concluded between Taiwan and the mainland over several years that continued to build economic ties between the two.
In 2011 Taiwan observed the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China, but by then economic growth had fallen off sharply, helping to fuel mounting discontent among voters. Nonetheless, in January 2012 Ma won a second presidential term, easily defeating the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen. Moreover, the KMT retained a majority in the legislature, despite losing 17 seats in the election. Tsai took responsibility for her electoral loss and resigned as the head of the DPP.
However, Ma’s popularity, and that of the KMT, went into decline as the economy continued to stagnate, complaints of poor governance mounted, and public unease grew over Taiwan’s increasingly close relations with mainland China, which many saw as endangering Taiwan’s sovereignty. A more general explanation of the decline is that Ma and the KMT’s brand of elitist moral leadership had waned and was overwhelmed by the DPP’s populism.
Popular protest movements grew at that time, including nearly a monthlong occupation of the Legislative Yuan by a student-led group seeking to block the legislature from ratifying a trade agreement with Beijing. Tsai was reelected chair of the DPP in 2014, and in elections that year DPP candidates ousted several incumbent KMT mayors, including those in the special municipalities of Taipei, T’ai-chung, and T’ao-yüan.
The elections constituted a major victory for the DPP and a serious setback for the KMT. The outcome mirrored further deterioration in the image of President Ma and the KMT, Tsai Ing-wen’s adroit leadership of the DPP, the continued rise of populism, the appeal of the DPP and its good candidates at the local level, and voters’ concerns over growing economic inequality and increasing dependence on mainland China. Many observers viewed the outcome as a signal that the DPP would win the national presidential and legislative elections in January 2016.
Toward the end of Ma’s presidency, in November 2015, he met with Chinese Pres. Xi Jinping, the first-ever encounter between the heads of the two governments. While Ma’s diplomatic effort did not, according to opinion polls taken at the time, influence how voters might cast their ballots in the upcoming election, it was viewed favorably by many observers. It reinforced Ma’s earlier initiatives to find a solution to the dispute between mainland China and Japan over the Senkaku (Diaoyu in Chinese) Islands in the North China Sea, which involved Taiwan. It also laid the groundwork for dealing with later tensions over opposing territorial claims in the South China Sea, where mainland China was building up islands and expanding its activities and Taiwan also had an interest. Ma’s proposals were applauded in the United States and elsewhere, thereby enhancing his reputation as a diplomat and peacemaker.
The Tsai Ing-wen presidency
On January 16, 2016, Taiwan’s voters went to the polls and gave Tsai Ing-wen, chair of the DDP, a resounding victory. She became Taiwan’s first female president by obtaining more than 56 percent of the popular vote, besting the support received by the two other candidates combined. She won more than three million votes more than the KMT’s standard-bearer, Eric Chu. She also had coattails. The DPP won a big victory in the legislative election, securing its first-ever majority in the lawmaking body.
Tsai had a clear mandate to govern, and so did the DPP. The KMT was now a weak opposition party, which meant that Tsai and her majority party in the legislature could put their agenda into effect and change Taiwan’s political landscape for the foreseeable future. Relations with mainland China would certainly be different, as might ties with the United States. Taiwan would be changed socially, economically, and in other ways.
Tsai’s win was the product of her having repaired the DPP’s very sullied image after the Chen Shui-bian presidency. Following her party’s 2008 defeats, she helped improve its morale and even guided it to win some small local and replacement elections. She kept the party’s focus on winning the support of the electorate with policies that were rational and popular. She was patient and an effective leader.
She rode the tide of populism and eschewed issues that would hurt the DPP at the polls. She avoided mention of former president Chen, Taiwan independence, “one China,” and the 1992 Consensus (an agreement whereby both sides of the Taiwan Strait would accept one China but could define “China” differently). She criticized the KMT’s elitist style of governance and its mistakes. She and her party activists took the KMT to task over Taiwan’s anemic economic growth (especially in the months before the election), growing economic inequality, the plight of youth (unemployment and lack of opportunities), energy policy (especially on nuclear energy, which became deeply unpopular in Taiwan after the accident in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011), education policy (insufficient focus on Taiwan), and commercial ties with mainland China (which appeared to make Taiwan dependent on it to a degree that endangered Taiwan’s sovereignty).
Tsai and the DPP deftly exploited KMT disunity. After the KMT’s bad defeat in the 2014 elections, it had difficulty choosing a candidate to run against Tsai. Eric Chu, the only KMT winner in the metropolitan mayoral races, was the obvious pick. However, Chu had vowed to finish his term as mayor, and he may have thought that, given the political climate, running for president was a futile undertaking. Wang Jin-pyng, the speaker of the legislature, was involved in an ongoing feud with President Ma and faced other detractors. Other possible candidates did not generate much support or create hope of winning. Hung Hsiu-chu, the deputy speaker, thus won the nomination by default. She failed to gain popularity among voters and thus lacked the necessary traction to beat Tsai.
As a consequence of Hung Hsiu-chu’s inability to generate voter interest, the KMT overturned her nomination and persuaded Chu to run. Some pundits said that changing horses in midstream was not a good idea and had come too late. In any event, Chu did not produce results in terms of changing the opinion polls, which favored Tsai by a significant margin. James Soong—former KMT secretary-general, governor of Taiwan province, and contender for the presidency in 2000, the vice presidency in 2004, and other offices thereafter—then entered the race, split the conservative vote, and to some extent diluted or brought confusion to the KMT campaign platform.
In the meantime, Tsai promised to return Taiwan to meaningful economic growth, pledging to make Taiwan’s economy an innovative one, to cement free-trade agreements, and to break into regional economic organizations that were becoming increasingly important in controlling world trade. She vowed to fix Taiwan’s economic, and thus also its social, inequities. She offered plans to help youth, the poor, and geographic areas of the island that were doing especially badly. She proposed a status quo policy for dealing with Beijing and traveled to the United States to win support (or at least neutrality) in the election by convincing official Washington of her sincerity in keeping the status quo and not provoking Beijing or taking the United States for granted, as former president Chen had. U.S. Department of State and other officials were impressed by her pitch, and, in contrast to their stance in previous elections, did not show favoritism toward the KMT.
Tsai assumed the presidency in May 2016. She was a unique president in a number of ways beyond being Taiwan’s first woman president. She was its first unmarried one. She was a member of a minority group, the Hakka, and had Indigenous blood. Her previous work in government related to dealing with economic and foreign policy matters. She was not by nature a populist and said so, even though populism was the modus operandi of her party. By her own admission, she was not an accomplished speaker or debater. She was an elitist by her education and the fact that she preferred to speak Mandarin Chinese rather than Minnan (Taiwanese; said to be the people’s language). Finally, she was a moderate in a party that on many issues was not moderate.
Notwithstanding her astounding election victory and the strong mandate to govern that resulted, President Tsai faced serious, even formidable, problems in office. Taiwan’s economy was on a fast downward trajectory. She had proposed remedies for this that had resonance with voters but were not too promising as fixes. Going into the election, she alienated the business community to some degree. Attaining free-trade agreements and participating in regional economic organizations depended on mainland China’s support. Her party, a social democratic one, wanted increased social spending and more government involvement in the economy. The higher taxes this implied and the fact that they would probably discourage foreign investments were not seen by many businesspeople as a good plan.
Tsai and the DPP were seriously, perhaps perilously, at odds with Beijing. The party stood for Taiwan’s greater separation and, formally speaking, Taiwan’s legal independence. Beijing was opposed to this approach, and some observers expected it to put extreme economic pressure on Taiwan or perhaps to call on its military to threaten the use of force against Taiwan if nothing else succeeded, to ensure that Taiwan, from Beijing’s viewpoint, did not go astray. The United States was Taiwan’s protector and its salvation, but America was not in the mood to employ its military to help Taiwan. Some officials in Washington did not trust President Tsai or her party, and some in the media and academe felt that the United States should abandon Taiwan in order to finally take leave of China’s civil war and remove the most serious source of conflict with Beijing.
John C. CopperThis equation looked as if it might shift when U.S. President-elect Donald Trump went against decades of diplomatic protocol by accepting a telephone call from Tsai in December 2016. It was the first conversation between leaders of the two governments since 1979, and it seemed to overturn the carefully calculated absence of formal diplomatic relations between Taiwan and the United States. That phone call prompted Beijing’s foreign ministry to lodge a formal complaint with the United States, though Tsai later said that the call did not signal a policy shift for Taiwan. Trump, for his part, recommitted the U.S. to the one-China policy in February 2017 during his first phone conversation as president with his Beijing counterpart, Xi Jinping. Nevertheless, in 2019 the Trump administration escalated the U.S. policy of selling arms to Taiwan by agreeing to provide tanks and missiles worth some $2.2 billion, along with 66 F-16C/D fighter jets at a cost of about $8 billion. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping intensified his call for Tsai to embrace the 1992 Consensus.
Under Tsai’s leadership, Taiwan’s economy expanded, though not dramatically, until 2019, when it outperformed regional rivals Hong Kong and South Korea. At the same time, wages grew only slowly and the gap in wealth inequality widened. The president’s attempts at pension and energy-policy reform proved generally unpopular. There was also widespread opposition to the legislature’s legalization of same-sex marriage, which had earlier been rejected in referendum. As a result of these developments, Tsai’s approval rating dipped significantly as the January 2020 presidential election appeared on the horizon. Many Taiwanese rallied to Tsai’s stance of fierce independence in opposition to Beijing, however, in response to events in Hong Kong, where for months the imposition of the increasingly authoritarian policies of Xi Jinping’s government was greeted with massive pro-democracy demonstrations that led to violent clashes between protestors and police.
In the January 11 presidential election, Taiwanese voters were given a choice between Tsai, the KMT’s Beijing-friendly Han Kuo-yu (the mayor of Kao-hsiung), and James Soong of the People First Party. The election was marred by accusations of interference by Beijing through the spread of misinformation on social media. When the results were in, Tsai had won a commanding victory, capturing some 57 percent of the vote, compared with about 39 percent for Han and just over 4 percent for Soong. In the legislative elections, the DPP lost seven seats but maintained its solid majority.
Soon after the election, Tsai and Taiwan were confronted with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which quickly circled the globe after the first cases of the disease, caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, were reported in China in December 2019. By aggressively combating the spread of the virus with a “zero-COVID” strategy grounded in stringent border controls, mandatory quarantines, rigorous contact tracing, and mask wearing (all of which received enthusiastic buy-in from the public), Taiwan succeeded in maintaining low infection and fatality rates until the outbreak of the Delta variant in May 2021. That spike was contained within about two months. Although the breakout of the Omicron variant later drove up case numbers to dramatically higher levels than those of the first surge, by June 2022 more than 80 percent of Taiwanese had been fully vaccinated, more than 60 percent had also received boosters, and the island largely had shifted to a “living with the virus” approach. Whereas the economies of many countries suffered mightily in the wake of the pandemic, Taiwan, as one of the world’s leading producers of semiconductors, profited from the worldwide shift to working at home and the increased need for laptop computers. Indeed, in 2020, for the first time in some 30 years, Taiwan’s annual economic growth (a roughly 3 percent increase in GDP) was greater than that of China.
During this period tensions grew with China, whose ever-increasing military buildup seemingly heightened Taiwan’s risk of invasion. For its part, Taiwan increased its defense spending to nearly $17 billion in 2022 (with an additional $8.6 billion to be spent over the next five years), but that figure paled next to China’s massive outlay. In 2021 U.S. Pres. Joe Biden entered office stepping up support for Taiwan with some $750 million dollars of arms sales, and U.S. warships passed through the Taiwan Strait roughly monthly that year. However, in stating on more than one occasion that the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s aid if it were attacked by China, Biden appeared to abandon the policy of strategic ambiguity, heightening U.S.-China tensions even though White House officials qualified his statements and emphasized that U.S. policy regarding Taiwan had not changed. Against this backdrop the proliferation of incursions of Chinese warplanes into Taiwan’s airspace seemed all the more threatening, especially in a world that was trying to come to grips with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In August 2022 U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to travel to Taiwan in some 25 years. The Chinese government had strongly warned against the visit, which it regarded as provocatively enhancing Taiwan’s international standing. In late July, amid escalating tensions, Xi Jinping also had warned Biden in a phone meeting that the U.S. should not “play with fire” regarding Taiwan. In addition, Taiwan-China relations deteriorated further as China sent increasing numbers of warships and fighter jets near Taiwan as well as conducted large military drills around the island in 2023. In October 2023, in light of growing concern over the potential of China’s invasion of Taiwan, Tsai reiterated that peace is the “only option” across the Taiwan Strait.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThe Lai Ching-te presidency
On January 13, 2024, the DPP candidate, Lai Ching-te (also called William Lai), who had served as vice president under Tsai Ing-wen, won the presidential election. The victory marked the first time since Taiwan’s transition to democracy that any political party had won three consecutive presidential elections. During his campaign, Lai advocated maintaining the status quo of de facto independence from China, prompting the Chinese government to label him a “complete troublemaker.” During the run-up to the election, Chinese spy balloons, similar to those shot down over the United States by the U.S. military in 2023, were seen over Taiwan, which some experts saw as a warning from China in the high-stakes election. With China becoming increasingly assertive, the election garnered global media attention because of its significant implications for regional security. Younger voters in Taiwan, who historically had been more supportive of the DPP, expressed their concerns about the island’s economic situation, which drove some of them toward the newer Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).
In spite of competition not only from the KMT but also from the TPP, Lai received approximately 40 percent of the total vote. The opposition KMT candidate, Hou Yu-ih, who was seen as favoring more amicable relations with Beijing, garnered 33.5 percent of the vote, and Ko Wen-je of the TPP received 26.5 percent. Despite its victory in the presidential election, the DPP failed to maintain its majority in the legislature, claiming about 45 percent of the total vote in the parliamentary elections to secure just 51 seats in the 113-seat body. Because no party held a parliamentary majority, experts suggested that Lai Ching-te would face legislative hurdles.
Several countries, including the United States, Singapore, and the Philippines, congratulated Lai for his win. China quickly criticized these messages as violations of the one-China policy. Prior to the elections, China had labeled Lai as a “destroyer of peace” because of his ideological commitment to Taiwanese sovereignty. For his part, Lai stated that the presidential election results represented a “victory for the community of democracies” and that in the contest between democracy and authoritarianism, Taiwan had chosen to stand on the “side of democracy.”