On October 30 at 4pm, the Taiwan Democracy Project at Stanford University will host our next event of the fall quarter, a talk by Alan Romberg, Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center. The talk is co-sponsored with the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative in the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. Among other research contributions, Mr. Romberg writes a regular report for the Hoover Institution's China Leadership Monitor that covers developments in Cross-Strait relations and the US-PRC-Taiwan trilateral relationship. 

The title of his talk is "Cross-Strait Relations after the 19th Party Congress." The event is free and open to the public; details on the talk and speaker are below.

On March 1, the Taiwan Democracy Project will host the next event in this year's speaker series, a talk by Richard C. Bush of the Brookings Institution. The talk is co-sponsored with the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative in the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford. Mr. Bush will be speaking about possible changes in cross-Strait relations in light of the results of the January 2016 elections in Taiwan, and their implications for U.S. policy. 

The talk is entitled: The January Taiwan Elections and the Implications for Cross-Strait Relations. Details are below.

Abstract
Taiwan’s domestic politics, particularly presidential elections, has been the main driver of the island’s relations with China for two decades. The 2016 elections, in which the Democratic Progressive Party, led by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, won both the presidency and majority control of the Legislative elections, promises to be no exception. Although PRC intentions under President Xi Jinping are far from certain, some change from the state of play under the current Ma Ying-jeou administration seems fairly certain, with implications for U.S. policy.

Bio
Richard Bush is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, and the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies. He came to Brookings in July 2002 after nineteen years working in the US government, including five years as the Chairman and Managing Director of the American Institute in Taiwan. He is the author of a number of articles on U.S. relations with China and Taiwan, and of At Cross Purposes, a book of essays on the history of America’s relations with Taiwan, published in March 2004 by M. E. Sharpe. In the spring of 2005, Brookings published his study on cross-Strait relations, entitled Untying the Knot: Making Peace in the Taiwan Strait. In 2013, Brookings published his Uncharted Strait: The Future of China-Taiwan Relations.

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.

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.  

I'm speaking on trends in Taiwan's defense spending on May 19th as part of the Taiwan Democracy Project Speaker Series. The official event page is here. The talk is motivated by the trends in the figures above: Taiwan's defense spending has dropped as China's has risen. To IR theorists, that should look weird. To policy wonks, it should be alarming. In the talk I will try to explain why it's happened.

On March 9, the Taiwan Democracy Project hosted Lu-huei Chen, research professor and former director of the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University, Taipei. His talk was entitled "Electoral Politics and Cross-Strait Relations." The official event page is here.

Professor Chen is Distinguished Research Fellow at the Election Study Center and Professor of Political Science at National Chengchi University in Taiwan.  He is currently a visiting scholar of Top University Strategic Alliance (TUSA) at MIT. Professor Chen received his Ph. D. in political science from Michigan State University. His research focuses on political behavior, political socialization, research methods, and cross-Strait relations.  He has published articles in Issues and Studies, Journal of Electoral Studies (in Chinese), Social Science Quarterly, and Taiwan Political Science Review (in Chinese). He is the editor of Continuity and Change in Taiwan's 2012 Presidential and Legislative Election (in Chinese, 2013), Public Opinion Polls (in Chinese, 2013), and co-edited The 2008 Presidential Election: A Critical Election on Second Turnover (in Chinese, with Chi Huang and Ching-hsin Yu, 2009).

On November 10, the Taiwan Democracy Project will host Dan Blumenthal of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for a talk on the latest developments in cross-Strait politics. Mr. Blumenthal is director of Asian Studies at AEI, where he focuses on East Asian security issues and Sino-American relations. His talk is provocatively entitled, "Time for Xi Jinping to Follow Chiang Ching-kuo's Path?" The full abstract is below. The talk is free and open to the public; you are encouraged to RSVP at the event page, here.

In addition to his duties at AEI, Mr. Blumenthal is also the John A. van Beuren Chair Distinguished Visiting Professor at the U.S. Naval War College. Blumenthal has both served in and advised the U.S. government on China issues for over a decade.  From 2001 to 2004, he served as senior director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the Department of Defense.  Additionally, he served as a commissioner on the congressionally-mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission since 2006-2012, and held the position of vice chairman in 2007. He has also served on the Academic Advisory Board of the congressional U.S.-China Working Group. Blumenthal is the co-author of An Awkward Embrace: The United States and China in the 21st Century (AEI Press, 2012), and coeditor of Strategy in Asia: The Past, Present, and Future of Regional Security (Stanford University Press, 2014).

On October 17-18, 2014, the Taiwan Democracy Project will put on our annual conference on Taiwan's democracy. This year's theme is the politics of polarization. The conference is free and open to the public; you are encouraged to register at the official event page, here. The formal announcement is below.

Although it passed mostly unnoted in the Taiwanese media, last week marked the one-year anniversary of the (failed) attempt by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to expel Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) from the KMT. It has also been about a year since I started blogging regularly on Taiwanese politics, so the Ma-Wang fight featured prominently in my first posts.  At the time, I hadn’t paid much attention to intra-KMT politics or executive-legislative relations, and I quickly realized there was a lot I didn't understand. My working assumption had always been that because the KMT controlled a comfortable majority in the legislature, and President Ma was the chairman of the KMT, he could probably get most of what he wanted approved there. 

The sudden attempt to purge Speaker Wang suggested that executive-legislative policy-making was more complicated, and more interesting, than I had supposed. And the slow, foot-dragging review of the Cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement (CSSTA) (兩岸服務貿易協議) --"Fu-Mao" for short--in the legislature put the lie to the idea that President Ma could ultimately wield control over the KMT to get executive priorities passed.  It eventually became clear that these two events were probably linked: that Ma's strike against Wang was motivated at least in part by his frustration with the slow pace of action on the CSSTA in the legislature. 

All this happened well before a procedural dispute sparked the student protest and occupation of the legislature that became known as the Sunflower Movement. Thus, while the student protests were unexpected and dramatic, and attracted a huge amount of foreign and domestic media attention, their main political achievement so far is to have reinforced the pre-existing stalemate between the legislature and the executive. The focus on the light and heat generated by the Sunflower Movement has, I think, obscured this fact: the legislature as an institution is a formidable and powerful opponent of the executive. 

In posts over the next few days, I'm going to elaborate on this claim, along with some thoughts on what it means for Taiwan's democracy. In particular, I think the events of the last year have demonstrated four things:

1. The Legislative Yuan matters more than ever for policy-making.
2. The KMT legislative caucus is the primary obstacle to presidential priorities--not the DPP, the Cross-Party Negotiation Committee, or Wang Jin-pyng.
3. President Ma thought removing Wang Jin-pyng would solve his problems with the legislature. It won't.
4. The Ma administration doesn't understand the politics of the legislature very well.

Separate posts will follow.