As many readers here may be aware, Taiwan held national elections this past weekend, voting for both president and the national legislature (known as the Legislative Yuan). Incumbent president Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won in a landslide over Han Kuo-yu of the Kuomintang (KMT; also known as the Nationalist Party) and James Soong of the KMT splinter People First Party. The DPP also maintained its legislative majority, winning 61 seats out of a total of 113 (a number of the newly elected minor party and independent legislators can also be expected to support the DPP on some issues).
This result is significant for a number of reasons. For decades, the KMT ruled Taiwan as an authoritarian one-party state (the official national flag actually has the KMT party symbol on it). The president wasn’t elected by popular vote until 1996, and it was only beginning in the same decade that there were fully competitive elections for the legislature. While the DPP won the presidency in 2000 due to a split in the KMT (Soong quit the KMT to run as an independent and took a large share of KMT voters with him, coming in second in a three-way race) and retained by an extremely narrow margin in 2004, the KMT kept an overwhelming majority in the Legislative Yuan and KMT members still made up most of the lower and mid-level bureaucracy. Together with the party’s vast wealth built up over decades in which the KMT had essentially been synonymous with the state, this meant that the KMT still held much of the power in the country, and it regained the presidency in 2008. Only in 2016 did the DPP finally gain control of both the presidency and the legislature, completing the first real transfer of power. If the KMT, which still has considerable institutional strength (though it has been forced to divest of most of its holdings), had won this election the four years of DPP control might have been seen as a temporary aberration like the brief breaks in LDP power in Japan. While the KMT may regain power in the future, another four years of DPP rule should at least help end the last vestiges of the old one party state (though whether the flag can be changed remains to be seen).
The DPP, though it is referred to as a “liberal” party on Wikipedia and has some leftist roots, is essentially centrist. Though it has made some progressive moves while in power, a lot of its record has been disappointing. On labor issues it has been far too willing to listen to corporate interests, and most of its environmental policies have been half-measures. But given that the KMT is essentially a conservative, right wing party, a DPP victory still has to be seen as good news on these and other issues. For example, while it dragged its feet a bit, the DPP did manage to pass legislation formally legalizing same-sex marriage, making Taiwan the first Asian nation to achieve marriage equality, despite the efforts of right wing religious groups that seem to have taken their talking points from similar groups in the US. Many KMT candidates, on the other hand, ran on rescinding that legislation and making same-sex marriage illegal again. Similarly, the KMT is even more corporate friendly and less environmentally friendly than the DPP. And some individual DPP politicians are real progressives, something that can’t be said of anyone in the KMT.
Of course the big issue in this election was relations with China. I should note that Western media reporting on Taiwanese politics sometimes exaggerates the importance of this issue, as domestic issues often play a more important role in Taiwanese elections. But in this election there is no question that the China issue was in the forefront of many voters’ minds. The Hong Kong protests and the repressive attitude the Chinese government has taken towards them helped solidify support for Tsai and the DPP, as younger Taiwanese in particular have no desire to accept Chinese rule (the nightmarish situation of the Uyghurs is an even more dramatic warning of how oppressive the Chinese regime can be, though I’m not sure how many Taiwanese were fully aware of what’s been going on in that area, as Taiwanese media hasn’t reported on it much). The Chinese have aggressively criticized Tsai, even resorting to sexist attacks, but as has been the case in the past their efforts have been counterproductive, helping her easily beat the KMT’s Han, an incompetent politician who rose to prominence by making wild, often nonsensical promises and getting heavy promotion from certain media sources (sound familiar?).
So as a long-time permanent resident of Taiwan, I am overall pretty pleased with the election results. What I’m less pleased with is the lack of response from many progressive politicians in the US, and the general long-term neglect of the Taiwan issue by many progressives. A number of leading Democrats did congratulate Tsai on her victory, including Nancy Pelosi, Joaquin Castro, and Ilhan Omar. But overall, a lot more Republicans than Democrats offered congratulations. What I found particularly disappointing was that the most progressive presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (my own favorite) failed to congratulate Tsai. According the article cited above, only the more “moderate” candidates Biden and Buttigieg tweeted congratulations.
I can’t help but think that this is symptomatic of the long-term neglect of the Taiwan issue that I referred to above. While I don’t agree with everything that The Nation publishes, they recently had a very good article on this exact issue. As noted in this article, the relative lack of interest in Taiwan among most progressive politicians in the US has led to otherwise fairly liberal Taiwanese politicians turning to some of the most right wing American politicians — people like Ted Cruz and John Bolton — for support regarding Taiwan’s international status. This, needless to say, is extremely irritating for a progressive living in Taiwan to observe.
To be perfectly clear, while people like Cruz, Bolton, Pompeo, Rubio, Ted Yoho, and so forth may support Taiwan, I don’t think they are doing it for the right reasons. They may say that it’s because they support Taiwan’s democracy, but really their main motivation is opposing China, and they’d probably support Taiwan if it was still an authoritarian, one-party state — after all, most of them don’t seem to have a problem supporting Saudi Arabia, which has a human rights record as awful as China’s. But it’s also understandable that Taiwanese take their support where they can find it.
Unfortunately what this leads to is Taiwanese telling me that they like the guy my daughter once dubbed Pumpkin Hitler, because they think he’s good for Taiwan. I point out to them that he’s an extremely unreliable “friend”, as the Kurds and so many others have discovered, and that he’s so terrible on so many other issues that any favors he accidentally does Taiwan are not even remotely worth the damage he’s doing elsewhere. For one thing, if he keeps taking us backwards on climate change, it may not matter whether Taiwan can remain independent of China, because the whole world may face ecological collapse. I recently pointed out to someone that while in principle I think US presidents should be willing to take calls from the Taiwanese president, I know he didn’t take Tsai’s congratulatory call because he had a well-thought out plan to raise the level of US-Taiwan government contacts but just because he likes to be flattered. He probably didn’t even know who Tsai was; he certainly didn’t act as if he had any inkling of the geopolitical implications. So while I would have been very happy to see President Hillary Clinton taking a call from Tsai Ing-wen because of what it would have implied about her intentions for US-Taiwan relations, what actually occurred had no practical benefit for Taiwan.
But to return to the progressive side of the equation, I do have to wonder where Warren, Sanders and other progressive Democrats stand on the issue of Taiwan. I have been pleased to see Warren speaking out on the Hong Kong protests, writing an opinion piece calling for the US to stand up to China and further commenting on the message Hong Kong voters sent Beijing in local elections, which provides some reassurance that she will stand up to China on human rights issues, but I’d like to see her offer more direct support for Taiwan, and the same goes for Sanders. Indeed, progressives in general should speak out more strongly, not only in support of Taiwan, but also in support of peoples suffering under severe Chinese oppression like the Tibetans and the Uyghurs. Not only should Taiwan be a natural ally for progressives (whereas the current IMPOTUS’s natural allies are people like Xi Jinping, Putin, Erdogan, el-Sisi, and such), but if progressive US politicians forge closer ties with Taiwan’s leadership, they can help push the DPP to do better on issues like the climate crisis and corporate power. So to our top Democratic politicians, don’t force Taiwan to rely on people like Ted Cruz. Show your support for Taiwan and its progressive-leaning politicians.