The Taiwan Democracy Project will hold its next seminar of the fall on December 1, in conjunction with the new U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. The speaker is Cortez Cooper, a senior international policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. He will be speaking about potential changes in cross-Strait relations and China's security strategy in light of the upcoming 2016 presidential and legislative elections in Taiwan. The event is free and open to the public; you can register at the event page.

​The talk is entitled: "Of Paradigms, Politics and Principles: The 2016 Taiwan Elections and Implications for China’s Security Strategy and Cross-Strait Relations." Details are below.

One of the major figures in East Asian Studies at Stanford, Ramon H. Myers, died this month after a long illness. He was 86.

Myers was the former curator of the East Asian Collection at the Hoover Institution, where he played a central role in acquiring new materials on Taiwan's post-war history, including a vast collection of documents from the KMT party archive in Taipei as well as the Chiang Kai-shek diaries.

He also wrote several influential books and articles on Taiwan. The best-known in Taiwan studies is probably The First Chinese Democracy: Political Life in the Republic of China on Taiwan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, 2nd ed. 2002), with Linda Chao, but he also co-authored a history of the 2-28 Incident in 1947 and co-edited a widely-read volume on the Japanese pre-war colonial empire, among others. 

For those interested in a personal history of sorts, I recommend this interview conducted by Hsiao-ting Lin and Da-chi Liao in 2007, before he retired as curator. It gives a fascinating view into the practical challenges and opportunities and the intellectual cross-currents faced by his generation of East Asia scholars. I've excerpted a particularly interesting bit below:

...
Why did Hoover want to recruit you?
Good question!  The curator was a Chinese gentleman called Ma (馬).  His predecessor Eugene Wu had been in charge of the Yenching Library at Harvard.  Before him was Mary Wright.  I also took the name Ma (馬).  The first Ma was only at Hoover for 6 years, but he had a very serious problem with women.  Several of them went to Director Glenn Campbell and complained.  Campbell offered Ma the choice of resigning or being fired.  Campbell wanted a curator who was also a scholar and a fundraiser.  I did not know about all these internal developments until I had been here 2 years.  I applied to be a senior fellow, and the committee concurred. Finally, the President of Stanford University agreed.
 
Did you have connections with Taiwan then?
No.  That came 2 years later.  Wei Yong (魏鏞) had been a National Fellow at Hoover in 1974. But he left to take up a job in Chiang Ching-kuo’s cabinet.  Campbell and Wei Yong and also Yuan Li Wu (吳元黎) helped me to visit Taiwan. Richard Starr, who was Campbell’s deputy, suggested I take a couple of trips to Taiwan.  Based on these travels, I developed a friendship with many in the KMT. 
 
With Lee Teng-hui (李登輝)?
 I met him much earlier, when I went to Taiwan in 1959.  He was at the Nong Fu Hui (農復會) and Taida’s Agricultural Economics Department (台大農經系).  We were once at conferences together, and admired one another’s agricultural economic work, which was the focus of our dialogue.  When I went back on short 2-3 week trips to meet Taiwanese people, I developed an interest in the KMT, and began to learn about Taiwan; one thing led to another.  I wrote a book on the February 28 Incident (二二八事件) with two other Chinese scholars. Next visit was to go to the Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung (中山大學) in 1982-83.
 
How did you know Qin Xiaoyi (秦孝儀)?
That was also accidental.  When Qin made his first visit to the US in 1984, he was invited to the Association for Asian Studies annual meeting in Chicago.  He wanted to come to Hoover or Stanford to get some publicity. I learned of his desire to visit Hoover before going to Chicago. So I arranged for Qin to come here. He gave a talk in the reading room of the East Asian Library. We had a huge audience for him to address.  He got a lot of publicity in the local newspaper about being invited to speak here.  He was very grateful and so he and Lee Huan (李煥) arranged for Edna (my wife) and me to go to the Sun Yat-sen University (中山大學).  Qin used his connection with Hoover to gain support from among the Chinese community.  This worked out very well for him and for us.  Then when I went out to Sun Yat-sen University, my ties with the KMT became closer.  I would say the Qin Xiaoyi’s trip in 1984 was very important.
 
Didn’t you know him before that?
I only had met him when he came to Hoover, and also two years later when Edna and I visited Kaohsiung. I also met Kuo Ta-chun (郭岱君), who came here on a grant from Institute of International Relations, National Cheng-chi University (政大國關中心). She came to Hoover and worked with me on a long article, which became a book on how to interpret Communist China.  We published it at the Hoover Press, and many people used it.  In the early 1980s, Western scholars were trying to re-evaluate the achievements of Chinese Communism, particularly Mao Zedong.  Our book was a comparison of how good the work of Taiwanese China-watchers compared with that of Europeans and America’s. I think we omitted the Japanese. We pointed out, quite credibly but controversially, that the Taiwanese Chinese-watchers were the best: they had met and were with Communist revolutionaries when they were doing underground spying. They had inside documents from intelligence sources far much better than we had.  They could make powerful arguments about CCP rule of China and interpret change.  Where they did best was interpreting how China was having a series of problems with the Communist system which proved that its problems were serious.
...

The Taiwan Democracy Project will hold its next seminar of the fall on November 11. The speaker is Jong-sung You, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political and Social Change at Australian National University, and he'll be speaking about  electoral campaign regulation in South Korea and Taiwan. The event is free and open to the public; you can register at the event page. The talk is entitled: "Liberal Taiwan versus Illiberal South Korea: The Divergent Paths of Electoral Campaign Regulation." Details are below.

Just about everyone with an interest in Taiwan has weighed in on the coming meeting between Ma Ying-jeou and Xi Jinping, abruptly announced on Tuesday. My own reaction: it's a big deal mostly for the symbolism, and there's not a lot of substance likely to come out of it. Thoughts in order:

1. This is not really about the 2016 elections in Taiwan. A lot of observers have suggested this is an attempt by President Ma and the KMT to influence the upcoming elections. I don’t think it is. The KMT is likely to lose the presidential election no matter what they do, in part because Ma Ying-jeou is a very unpopular incumbent. For the party to have a chance, the new KMT nominee Eric Chu needs to distance himself from Ma as much as possible. Ma’s meeting with Xi will knock Eric Chu off the front pages for a week and remind everyone that Ma Ying-jeou is still the president. I don’t see how that’s helpful to the KMT’s election chances.

2. This is a good thing for Taiwan's next leader. There's speculation that the meeting instead will serve to lock in the improvements in the cross-Strait relationship that have accrued under Ma, and somehow constrain Tsai Ing-wen's room to maneuver. Maybe, but I don't see how this will really harm a DPP president. Beijing is setting a precedent here for future meetings with whoever the directly elected leader of Taiwan is--note that Ma is meeting Xi as "Taiwan leader," not the chair of the KMT (a role he no longer holds), and the special emphasis on meeting as equals, right down to calling each other "Mr." and splitting the bill for the meal! That's a principle that adds to the legitimacy of the office of President of the Republic of China on Taiwan, and in turn makes it harder for Beijing to sustain the claim that a non-KMT president is illegitimate and that direct engagement is therefore inappropriate.  

3. This is less about Ma, and more about Xi. These kinds of events are often the result of years of diplomatic maneuvering. A meeting with Xi Jinping has been a goal of the Ma administration for several years. It would be a symbolically powerful capstone to his legacy of improving Taiwan’s ties with the PRC. In fact, it could have happened over a year ago at the 2014 APEC meeting in Beijing. From what I can tell, it didn’t because leaders in Beijing rejected the idea. For it to happen now suggests that something has changed on the PRC side of the relationship, not the Taiwan side. 

4. This is part of a larger diplomatic initiative by Xi. It’s useful to place this action by Beijing in a larger context. Xi Jinping recently completed a successful visit to the UK, and just last week premier Li Keqiang attended an important trilateral meeting with the leaders of South Korea and Japan in Seoul. Beijing also recently received a delegation from the Vatican. So the meeting with Ma fits into a larger pattern recent of conciliatory gestures by the Xi foreign policy team toward major players in the region and beyond. Again, it’s not as much about Ma as about what’s going on in Beijing.

5. The meeting will probably be long on symbolism, short on substance. The historical symbolism is striking, but the meeting is unlikely to have significant practical consequences. President Ma is not in a position to offer any meaningful concessions, and cannot credibly commit to any deals that might be struck, since he’d have to get them approved by the legislature, and he’ll be out of office in just a few months. The more important steps have already been taken: the leaders of the official agencies of the two sides—the Mainland Affairs Council in Taiwan, the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing--have already met in person before, and they communicate regularly. Under Ma, Beijing and Taipei have signed over 20 agreements to institutionalize aspects cross-Strait interactions. The fact that ordinary Taiwanese can get on a commercial flight in downtown Taipei and be in Shanghai in two hours is far more consequential than anything that is likely to come out of the meeting on November 7.