Taiwan’s January 16
general elections saw the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) secure
a majority of the legislature, and the party’s presidential candidate, Tsai
Ing-wen, will take office in May as the country’s first female head of state.
Tsai Ing-wen received a roaring 56 percent of the vote, while the candidate for
the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), Eric Chu, received 31 percent and James Soong from
the opposition People First Party (PFP) only 12 percent. This is the third time
that a presidential candidate from the DPP has won the right to govern the
country, considering the successful election of the party’s earlier candidates
in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
Another achievement of the DPP in
the polls was its obtainment of 68 out of the 113 seats that make up Taiwan’s
unicameral parliament, the Legislative Yuan effectively ending the KMT’s
dominance of this body that has lasted since 1949. With both the presidency and
the parliament, the DPP has a secured a solid foundation for its leadership
that will span the next four years.
One China or independence?
Following World War II, Republic of
China (ROC) President Chiang Kai-shek’s army lost the Chinese Civil War to the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led by Mao Zedong, and retreated to Taiwan
Island. With this “two Chinas” emerged in the international arena. This created
a schism between the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which effectively ruled
mainland China, and the ROC, which claimed to represent mainland China from
Taiwan Island, and thus incited a crisis of Chinese representation at the
United Nations (UN) which lasted for over twenty years. Nonetheless, the issue
was largely resolved in 1971 when the PRC took the ROC’s seat at the UN and
therewith assumed representation of China at the international level. After
this, the ROC has failed to gain recognition as an independent state by many
countries, yet it has continued to act independently under the name of Taiwan.
In addition, the ruling KMT leaders never gave up Taiwan’s claim to the
representation of the whole of China. Here, even though both the PRC and the
ROC agreed on the 1992 consensus, thereby declaring that they both were parts
of one China, to this day neither agree on who represents this China as a
whole.
Another dimension of the issue can
be seen in the fact that Taiwanese identity has increasingly come to prominence
on the island with the support of the oppositional ethnic Chinese and other minorities
that settled in Taiwan before and after 1949.With this dynamic in mind, it
should be noted that within the domestic arena of Taiwan, the DPP favors
completely giving up Taiwan’s claim to represent the whole of China under the
name of the ROC, and instead seeks to promote Taiwan’s path as a fully
independent state under the name of the “Republic of Taiwan”. Considering that
Beijing has announced that it would consider an official declaration of
independence by Taiwan as cause of war (casus belli) in combination with the
abovementioned posturing of the DPP, Taipei-Beijing relations fell to an
all-time low during the DPP presidency of Chen Shui-bian between 2000 and 2008.
Ma Ying-jiu and the golden era of China-Taiwan
relations
It can be said that China-Taiwan
relations entered their golden age during the presidency of Ma Ying-jiu, who
took office in Taiwan in 2008. President Ma Ying-jeou ontinued the KMT’s “One
China” policy, and as an important step within the framework of a scenario that
could eventually lead to unification in the future, he oversaw the commencement
of mutual flights between China and Taiwan, thus opening the floodgates for
millions of tourists and businesspeople who would travel across the Taiwan
Strait each year. Thanks to the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA)
that was signed between Taiwan and China, Taiwanese investment in and trade
with continental China began to increase over time, with China eventually
becoming Taiwan’s largest trading partner.
By 2014, the volume of bilateral
trade between the two exceeded 198 billion US dollars per annum, with 152
billion US dollars of this figure representing Taiwan’s exports to mainland
China. From 2008 to 2014, while China’s direct investment in Taiwan was 1.2
billion US dollars Taiwan invested 61 billion US dollars in China. After 2008
and the commencement of direct flights, social contacts between the two have
flourished. To illustrate, in the first nine months of 2015 alone, the number
of Chinese tourists who traveled to Taiwan was 3.1 million, and the number of
Taiwanese tourists/businesspeople who traveled to mainland China (excluding
Hong Kong and Macau) exceeded 4 million. Aside from those commuting for a short
trip, nearly half a million Taiwanese businesspeople have now taken up
residence in China. Finally, at the political level, President Ma and President
Xi Jinping carried bilateral relations to their highest point with the first
Taiwan-China Summit on November 7, 2015 in Singapore.
Throughout this period, the growing economic
relations between China and Taiwan have favored the latter, but the Taiwanese
have begun to worry that Taiwan is becoming increasingly dependent on one
single country, and what’s more it is the country with which they have been
engaged in their primary existential struggle. Furthermore, Beijing’s tendency
to attempt to guide Taiwanese society, politics, and media by way of Taiwanese
businesspeople who work in China has increased the discomfort among the people
of Taiwan. In such an environment, social awareness of issues revolving around
the protection of Taiwanese identity and the currently existent political
independence of Taiwan has strengthened.
Within this context, as the result
of intense student protests that took place between March and April 2014, the
Taiwanese parliament blocked the ratification of certain articles of the
China-Taiwan ECFA regarding the services sector that would accelerate the
migration of Chinese nationals to Taiwan. Another development that fueled the
concerns of the Taiwanese was the Hong Kong protest against China which broke
out in the end of 2014. Here, residents of Hong Kong organized months of street
protests to combat what they claimed to be Beijing’s gradual erosion of the
autonomy of Hong Kong. These events have largely been perceived in Taiwan as
evidence that the “One Country-Two Systems” unification model which has been
put forward by Beijing, and implemented in Hong Kong and Macau, would not work
in the Taiwanese context. Thus, the public’s negative response to the ruling
KMT, which supports the One China policy and tends towards unification with
China, rapidly expanded in step with growing support for the pro-independence
opposition DPP.
Taiwan’s DPP government and China’s possible response
During the presidency of Tsai, the
world will be observing with curiosity how China-Taiwan relations will be
shaped. Tsai said in her victory speech after the election that she rejects the
One China consensus, and called on China to respect the choice of the people of
Taiwan. Here, the next critical threshold will come when and if President
Tsai’s DPP articulates an official policy of independence in line with the
party’s discourse of independence. It is clear that Taiwan’s relations with
China will face significant jolts if such a discourse of independence is
frequently voiced by senior officials. The emergence of such a problem across
the Taiwan Strait is not a desired situation for the international community,
and especially not for the US. During the first year of her mandate, President
Tsai will probably work to reduce Taiwan’s excessive economic dependence on
China, and will try to develop new economic partnerships with other countries.
The main problem here lies in the degree to which President Tsai will actually
be able to find alternatives that could take the place of an economy as large
as that of China without jeopardizing the prosperity of Taiwan.
On the other hand, how Beijing will
react to the coming of power of the DPP is also significant. After the
elections, statement issued through China’s official channels and media both
implicitly and explicitly warned against imagining the independence of Taiwan,
and underlined that the issue of Taiwan fundamentally falls within the realm of
China’s internal affairs. Beijing identified former President Chen from the DPP
as a leader who troubled and spoiled bilateral relations between China and
Taiwan, as they were brought to an all-time low while he was in office. At this
point, China may have the upper hand, as it can use recent trends in trade,
investment, and tourism against Taiwan. If President Tsai develops and voices a
strategy to achieve independence, President Xi could enact economic sanctions,
and this could push President Tsai to pursue a more balanced approach; yet at
the same time, such could also incite the Taiwanese people to extend greater
support for Taiwan’s independence. Amid such uncertainty it nonetheless remains
clear that the leadership of both President Tsai and President Xi will come to
face some serious tests in the forthcoming period.
By Selcuk Çolakoğlu
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