Kharis Templeman (祁凱立)
中文姓名:祁凱立
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PTIP: Trump And Taiwan: A Big, Beautiful Relationship Or The Deal Maker’s Ultimate Bargaining Chip?

4/8/2025

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The Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region hosted Trump and Taiwan: A Big, Beautiful Relationship or the Deal Maker’s Ultimate Bargaining Chip? on Tuesday, April 8, 2025 from 4:00-5:15 pm PT at Shultz Auditorium, George P. Shultz Building.

We are only in the first quarter of the first year of President Trump’s second term, but we’ve all already experienced a dizzying pace of activity. Whole federal agencies have been shuttered, some longstanding agency core missions have been upended, and we are suddenly in a trade war with unknown consequences. Ukraine has been dumped, then courted again. Canada is threatened with annexation, Greenland with invasion.

In the midst of this chaotic approach to governance, the U.S. Indo-Pacific policy is still to be defined. There are some disruptions such as new tariffs (though forecasted long ago), and the suspension of development assistance, but one could also cite policy continuity (e.g. AUKUS and the Quad) and a slew of traditional, conventional practices (e.g. leader visits with joint statements and annual military exercises). Yet absent the release of strategic documents such as a national security strategy, and absent a major address by the President or Cabinet official, the overriding feelings in the region are uncertainty and unease.

​This very much includes Taiwan. While Taiwan has pro-actively taken steps to earn the “right” kind of attention of the new U.S. Administration such as announcing major investments in the United States and increases to its defense budget, many critical questions remain. Are we on the cusp of a closer, stronger relationship with Taiwan with enduring commitments, or are we building trade space for President Trump’s next big deal with China? Mr. Schriver will explore these important topics based on his three decades of policy work related to Taiwan and the Indo-pacific, as well as his services as a senior official in the first Trump Administration.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
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Mr. Randall Schriver is the Chairman of the Board of the Project 2049 Institute and a Partner at Pacific Solutions LLC.  In January 2022, he was appointed as a Commissioner to the U.S. – China Security and Economic Review Commission and currently serves the Commission as the Vice Chairman.  He is also a lecturer for Stanford University’s “Stanford-in-Washington” program, is on the Board of Advisors to the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, and Board of Directors of the US-Taiwan Business Council.

Mr. Schriver served from 2018-19 as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs. He also served from 2003-05 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, during which his portfolio included China, Taiwan, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. From 2001 to 2003, he was Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of State. From 1994 to 1998, he worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, including as the senior official responsible for U.S. bilateral relations with the People's Liberation Army and the bilateral security and military relationships with Taiwan.

Prior to his civilian service, he served as an active-duty Navy Intelligence Officer from 1989 to 1991, including a deployment in support of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. After active duty, he served in the Navy Reserves for nine years, including as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an attaché at U.S. Embassies Beijing and Ulaanbaatar.

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Taiwan Is on the Brink of a Constitutional Crisis

1/19/2025

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And maybe a fiscal one, too. And no, it has nothing to do with China. 
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December 20, 2024: When the cameras roll, the shoving begins...The DPP party caucus tries and fails to blockade the speaker's podium to prevent a final vote on three controversial bills. / Taipei Times
On December 20, amid shouting, shoving, fistfights, and broken furniture, Taiwan’s opposition-controlled legislature passed by a show of hands three controversial bills that threaten to kneecap its government. The first raised the threshold to recall elected officials. The second required the Constitutional Court to have a 2/3 quorum to hear constitutional cases and imposed a supermajority threshold to invalidate a law. And the third shifted the central-local revenue-sharing formula to give local governments (mostly KMT-run) 40 percent of all government revenues, up from 25 percent, at the expense of the DPP-run central government.
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Four days later, the same opposition majority in the legislature voted down all seven of President Lai’s nominees to the Constitutional Court, leaving it with only eight justices and unable to meet the new quorum requirement for hearing a case. It is now effectively paralyzed. The DPP government has nevertheless requested that the court meet and rule anyway on whether the amendments to the Constitutional Court Act are themselves unconstitutional. This increasingly destructive partisan political conflict has put Taiwan on the brink of a constitutional crisis with no obvious way to resolve it. 

This confrontation is also taking place in a democracy that Freedom House last year ranked as the second-best in Asia, behind only Japan, and significantly above the United States and most of Europe. Taiwan's political system has proven remarkably resilient to PRC influence operations over many years, and it has a capable and effective state and vibrant economy despite its diplomatic isolation. So why is it facing a political crisis now?

A Divided Legislature and a Missed Opportunity 

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February 1, 2024: Han Kuo-yu and Johnny Chiang celebrate winning both the speaker and deputy speaker positions with other KMT legislators, including Fu Kun-chi. / CNA
​The simplest answer is divided government. For the first time in 16 years (and only the second time in its democratic history), Taiwan's legislative and executive branches are controlled by different parties: the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People's Party (TPP) together hold a majority in the Legislative Yuan, and they are locked in a fierce power struggle with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government.  

This conflict was not inevitable. In the January 2024 presidential and legislative elections, the DPP's Lai Ching-te (賴清德) won the presidential election but with only 40% of the vote, and the DPP lost its majority in the legislature. The KMT ended up with 52 seats (plus two blue-leaning independents), the DPP won 51, and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je's (柯文哲) centrist TPP won eight (all via the party list vote). That left no party with a majority and made the TPP the crucial swing voting bloc in the LY. In theory, the TPP could have exploited that leverage to extract significant concessions from the ruling DPP -- on policy, legislative leadership, or cabinet positions. But instead, negotiations between the DPP and TPP went nowhere, and President Lai missed his chance to head off the last year of partisan warfare.   

The formation of battle lines first became apparent on February 1, when the new legislature was seated. Its first order of business was to elect a speaker and deputy speaker. Curiously, the TPP  ultimately decided not to support either of the major party nominees -- the party's eight legislators voted for TPP member Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊) in the first round, and abstained in the second.  As a result, the KMT's Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) won the speaker's race, and KMT legislator Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) was elected as his deputy. Despite providing crucial help to the KMT, the TPP did not manage to win even the deputy speaker as the price for their support. Nor did they strike a deal with the DPP, either, although that should have secured at least one of the leadership positions for the party. Given that the TPP held the crucial votes that could have denied control of the legislature to either major party, this outcome seems like a major missed opportunity for both them and the DPP. 

I've heard competing explanations for this bargaining failure. One story is that the refusal came from the DPP side -- ruling party legislators were engaged in quiet conversations with the TPP about a possible power-sharing deal, but Lai Ching-te intervened to stop the negotiations. Reporting at the time suggested that the TPP's price for cooperation in the run-up to February 1 was for the DPP to support Huang Shan-shan for speaker -- a price the DPP was apparently not willing to pay, but which in hindsight they probably should have. That interpretation is also consistent with the public comments offered by party caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) that "A DPP-TPP partnership is only possible if the TPP voluntarily comes to us."​So maybe this was a strategic mistake by the DPP caucus (and ultimately, Lai himself), and they are suffering the consequences. 

But another possibility is that the TPP was just never seriously interested in cooperating with the DPP no matter what they offered -- even before  Ko Wen-je's detention in a corruption investigation several months later turbocharged the TPP's animosity toward the DPP government. Although the KMT-TPP negotiations for a joint presidential ticket broke down in spectacular public fashion in November 2023, the two parties did still enter into a pre-election coalition for the legislative races and even campaigned together, so perhaps TPP leaders had already made up their minds to team up with the KMT after the elections, too, and there really was no chance the DPP could have enticed them to defect.  

Whatever the reason, ever since the new legislature was seated on February 1, the TPP has consistently chosen to act as the KMT's junior partner and supported the opposition party's confrontational approach to the DPP government. And as the partisan divide has hardened, it has also transformed into an inter-branch conflict between the KMT-TPP majority in the legislature and the DPP in the executive. The partisan maneuvering that has followed has escalated over the last year to a level of open political warfare that is posing a severe test for Taiwan's democratic institutions. And it is a test they are failing.

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PTIP Annual Conference - Taiwan After The 2024 Elections

5/23/2024

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On behalf of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and The Global Policy and Strategy Initiative, the Hoover Institution invites you to Taiwan After the 2024 Elections Annual Conference, Thursday, May 23, 2024, from 8:30 AM - 5:15 PM to Friday, May 24, 2024 from 8:45 AM - 2:00 PM in HHMB 160.
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Taiwan’s next president William Lai (賴清德) takes office on May 20, 2024. His victory in the January 2024 elections ensures that the ruling Democracy Progressive Party (DPP) will hold the presidency for an unprecedented third consecutive term. But Lai won only 40 percent of the presidential vote, and the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) together now control a majority of the seats in the legislature. President-elect Lai’s new administration is also likely to face continued pressure from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and he will have to deal with an increasingly complex and uncertain international environment.  
 
Join us as we bring together a diverse group of experts to discuss the policy challenges and opportunities that the incoming Lai administration will face. It will feature panels on the 2024 election results, governance challenges, the future of Taiwan’s economy, security and defense issues, US-Taiwan-PRC relations, and perspectives of key U.S. allies and partners on the U.S.-Taiwan relationship.
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This conference will bring together a diverse group of experts to discuss the policy challenges and opportunities that the incoming Lai administration will face. It will feature panels on the 2024 election results, governance challenges, the future of Taiwan’s economy, security and defense issues, US-Taiwan-PRC relations, and perspectives of key U.S. allies and partners on the U.S.-Taiwan relationship.

Agenda

Participant Bios

​Conference Report
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PTIP: The World's Most Dangerous Place? Assessing the Prospects for War and Peace in the Taiwan Strait

11/16/2023

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On behalf of Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and its National Security Task Force, the Hoover Institution held The World’s Most Dangerous Place? Assessing the Prospects for War and Peace in the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 12:00 PM PT. 
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In recent years, numerous analysts have warned of an increasing risk of war in the Taiwan Strait. Others, however, have argued that military conflict remains unlikely, and that the risk of war should not be over-hyped. Drawing from his recent book, Scott Kastner outlines a framework through which to assess the prospects for military conflict between China and Taiwan. Drawing on international relations theory, Kastner outlines several causal pathways through which a Taiwan Strait conflict could occur, and assesses how broad trends in China-Taiwan-US relations are affecting the likelihood of these different scenarios. He concludes with policy suggestions for how actors in Beijing, Taipei and Washington could mitigate the risks of a war in the Taiwan Strait.

About the Participants

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Scott L. Kastner is a professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He graduated from Cornell University and received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. His books include Political Conflict and Economic Interdependence across the Taiwan Strait and Beyond (Stanford University Press, 2009); China’s Strategic Multilateralism: Investing in Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2019; with Margaret Pearson and Chad Rector); and War and Peace in the Taiwan Strait (Columbia University Press, 2022).
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Kharis Templeman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and part of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific. Templeman is a political scientist (Ph.D. 2012, Michigan) with research interests in Taiwan politics, democratization, elections and election management, party system development, and politics and security issues in Pacific Asia.

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PTIP: Then What?: Assessing the Military Implications of Chinese Control of Taiwan

2/28/2023

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On behalf of Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and its National Security Task Force, the Hoover Institution invites you to a talk by Caitlin Talmadge, associate professor of Security Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, entitled Then What? Assessing the Military Implications of Chinese Control of Taiwan on Friday, March 3, 2023 from 12:00 - 1:15 pm PT. To attend, register at the event page. 
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Talk Abstract
​The military implications of Chinese control of Taiwan are understudied. Chinese control of Taiwan would likely improve the military balance in China's favor because of unification's positive impact on Chinese submarine warfare and ocean surveillance capabilities. Basing Chinese submarine warfare assets on Taiwan would increase the vulnerability of U.S. surface forces to attack during a crisis, reduce the attrition rate of Chinese submarines during a war, and likely increase the number of submarine attack opportunities against U.S. surface combatants. Furthermore, placing hydrophone arrays off Taiwan's coasts for ocean surveillance would forge a critical missing link in China's kill chain for long-range attacks. This outcome could push the United States toward anti-satellite warfare that it might otherwise avoid, or it could force the U.S. Navy into narrower parts of the Philippine Sea. Finally, over the long term, if China were to develop a large fleet of truly quiet nuclear attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines, basing them on Taiwan would provide it with additional advantages. Specifically, such basing would enable China to both threaten Northeast Asian sea lanes of communication and strengthen its sea-based nuclear deterrent in ways that it is otherwise unlikely to be able to do. These findings have important implications for U.S. operational planning, policy, and grand strategy.

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Speaker Bio
Caitlin Talmadge is associate professor of Security Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, as well as Senior Non-Resident Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, and Research Affiliate in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During fall 2022 she also holds the Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the United States Library of Congress.
 
Professor Talmadge’s research and teaching focus on deterrence and escalation, U.S. military operations and strategy, and security issues in Asia and the Persian Gulf. She is author of The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Cornell, 2015), which Foreign Affairs named the Best Book in Security for 2016 and which won the 2017 Best Book Award from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association. In addition, she is co-author of U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy (fourth edition, Routledge, 2021), and she is currently writing a book with Professor Brendan Green on nuclear escalation risk in the emerging deterrence environment.

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PTIP: Phillip Saunders, April 6

4/7/2022

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On April 6, Phillip Saunders of National Defense University spoke about PLA modernization and its implications for Taiwan's defense strategy and U.S.-Taiwan security cooperation. The talk abstract is below; the video is now available at the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific event page.  


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Drawing upon the new book Crossing the Strait: China’s Military Prepares for War with Taiwan, Dr. Saunders will discuss China’s available military options, how organizational reforms and new capabilities have improved the PLA’s ability to execute these options, the current cross-strait military balance, the challenges China would face in trying to resolve the Taiwan issue by force, and how Beijing weighs military, economic, and political factors in its evolving Taiwan policy calculus. His presentation will draw upon extensive open-source analysis of PLA efforts to build the necessary power projection capabilities and discuss how lessons learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may affect thinking in China, Taiwan, and the United States.
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Featuring Phillip C. Saunders Director, Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs National Defense University, followed by conversation with Kharis Templeman, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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Testimony for US-China Economic and Security Review Hearing

2/22/2021

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On February 18, I had the privilege of joining a strong group of witnesses in testifying before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission on the topic of "Deterring PRC Aggression toward Taiwan." The USCC has a congressional mandate "to monitor, investigate, and submit to Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, and to provide recommendations, where appropriate, to Congress for legislative and administrative action."

I can still remember when I first became familiar with the depth and quality of USCC's annual report, when I was an undergraduate taking -- what else? -- Chinese politics with Melanie Manion at the University of Rochester. Parts of it were assigned reading then, and parts no doubt still are now, 20 years later, in the many Chinese security and politics courses around the country. So it is gratifying and a bit humbling to be in a position to contribute in some small way to the next iteration.

I also want to note here that, while I was an undergraduate, I received crucial funding from the National Security Education Program (NSEP, now known as the Boren Awards) to study abroad in Beijing and Taipei. That experience kindled my interest in Taiwan, set me on my current trajectory and, quite literally, changed my life. I hope that robust funding for studying the language and culture of countries that have national security implications for the United States will be available for years to come--it is a smart investment in our future, and an increasingly important incentive to learn a foreign language in an era when the numbers of American students studying abroad in China has dropped precipitously. 

I would not be in a position today to contribute to the public conversation on Taiwan's security issues without the help of the Boren program, and I hope my testimony last week will go some small way toward repaying the investment NSEP made in me and my career.  

​The full video of the panel and the written testimony, including my own, are available at the USCC hearing website. In addition, since it is much abridged from the written testimony, I have posted my oral remarks below. 
Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. I have been asked to cover quite a lot of ground in my written testimony, so in my oral remarks I’m going to focus on my comparative advantage in this hearing: How to Assess Taiwan’s Will to Fight. 
 
Assessing Taiwan’s “Will to Fight” 
 
“Will to fight” is a vague concept, and assessing it a hard thing to do rigorously. But we do have at least three kinds of data we can observe to give us some purchase on this question: public opinion, budgets, and willingness to serve in the military. 
 
Public Opinion
The first is public opinion data. There are many surveys of defense and security-related issues conducted every year. I’m not going to go through them in detail, but simply note that when you look at the general patterns that appear consistent across surveys, they support four key observations. 
 
First, Taiwanese on the whole are not very confident about their own military’s ability to defend the country—especially alone—against an attack by the PRC. There is a great deal of pessimism. 
 
Second, they are generally much more confident in their fellow Taiwanese. About 2/3 – ¾ think most others would actively resist a PRC attack.  And, their own willingness to resist is closely correlated with their estimates of how many others also do so. 
 
Third, the majority of Taiwanese – anywhere from 2/3 to ¾ -- indicate willingness to participate in the defense of Taiwan as long as the US is also involved. If the US is not involved, this share drops below half. So US participation in the defense of Taiwan has an important psychological and morale-boosting element as well as a practical one. 
 
And fourth, the majority of Taiwanese remain confident that the United States would intervene to stop a PLA invasion, even if Taiwanese leaders themselves triggered an attack by declaring independence. 
 
So, to sum up: if they believe the US will also be involved, most Taiwanese are willing to resist, and think most others will too. If they believe the US will not, then most will not. Beliefs about our presence is a critical variable in Taiwanese “will to fight.”  
 
 
Defense Budgets
A second way to assess Taiwan’s “will to fight” is to look at defense budgets. Until recently, these data have suggested a half-hearted commitment to defending itself. 
 
Starting in the mid-1990s, Taiwan’s defense budget in real terms flattened out for 20 years. It declined as a share of GDP from about 5% in 1994 to about 2% in 2016. Last year Taiwan spent in real terms roughly what it spent in 1994. Meanwhile, the PRC spent 25 times what it spent in 1994. 
 
We all know that Taiwan cannot keep up with the PRC’s increases, which have generally been in proportion to GDP growth.
 
What is more striking is Taiwan’s relative decline even compared to other states in the region. For instance, in 1989, Taiwan spent about 2/3 of what SK spent. In 2020, it spent less than 1/3. Put bluntly, going by budgets, Taiwan looks like it’s shirking on defense.  
 
However, this has changed significantly in the past four years. Taiwan’s announced defense budget has increased in local currency terms by about 40%: from 321 bn NTD in 2016, to 453 bn in 2021, and the share of the central government budget going to defense has climbed back to 20 percent, a level it has not been at since 1999. 
 
That is at least a start and suggests that under President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan is committing significantly more resources to its own defense.  

 
Willingness to Serve in the Military
A third type of data we can use to assess this question is willingness to join the military. Here the patterns are not encouraging. In 2012, the Ma Ying-jeou administration approved a phase-out of conscription, to be replaced by an all-volunteer force. This transition has been repeatedly delayed, so that today, all adult able-bodied men are still required to serve four months—not enough time to learn much of use and develop into capable reserves. 
 
The main reason is repeated shortfalls in recruiting. Put simply, most young Taiwanese have no interest in joining. And their brief time as conscripts does not change their minds. Most young people see the military as a path of last resort, only if they have no other options. So, we observe a contradiction: young Taiwanese are the most pro-Taiwan, anti-China, pro-democracy and pro-independence of any generation, but the vast majority would never consider volunteering to join the military. 
 
This might be changing as a potential confrontation with the PRC looms larger, as the military threat becomes more salient—and as the military acquires new high-profile platforms. But this is an area that requires a great deal of work from the MND and civilian leadership to improve the public image of the military, and to strengthen Taiwan’s training and reserve system. 
 
 
Recommendations
 
1. Strengthen the credibility of US commitment to Taiwan through NON-military ties. The ability to deter a Taiwan Strait crisis rests crucially on beliefs that the US would act to counter PRC coercion because it is in our own interests to do so. 
 
That belief has weakened in Asia over the last four years, in part because the previous administration put up trade barriers and pulled out of the TPP. One way to reverse impressions that we will not be committed to Asia is to reengage in regional trade negotiations.
 
As one example, the USTR should open bilateral trade negotiations with Taiwan as soon as is feasible. Taiwan needs economic gestures of support as well as military ones, and bilateral trade talks would be a clear sign of deepening cooperation. If the Biden administration eventually decides to re-commit to negotiations for the CPTPP, use the leverage this opportunity offers to insist on Taiwan’s (and South Korea’s) participation in membership negotiations as well.  
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China's Military Incursions Around Taiwan Aren't a Sign of Imminent Attack

10/21/2020

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PictureTaiwan Ministry of National Defense figure illustrating PLA incursions into Taiwan's southwestern ADIZ on September 9-10, 2020.
China's recent military bravado in the Taiwan Strait represents the end state of a failed strategy

The drums of war are growing louder in the Taiwan Strait. In the last month, at least 50 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft have entered Taiwan’s airspace. The volume of threatening language directed at Taiwan from sources in China, both official and unofficial, has reached a crescendo, and the headlines in the news grow more alarmingeach month. In the United States, mainstream foreign policy voices are now openly debating whether the U.S. should abandon strategic ambiguity and openly commit to defend Taiwan in the case of an attack — an idea advocated not so long ago by only a radical fringe.

​But these dire headlines are misleading: Beijing is not gearing up for an attack on Taiwan. It still has neither the capacity to launch a successful full-scale invasion, nor the motive to risk a conflict with the United States. In reality, the increasingly bellicose language coming from China is a sign of weakness, not strength, and a cover for the failure of its own Taiwan policy. Having thrown away most of its non-military leverage in a fruitless effort to compel Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to endorse its one China principle, Beijing has now been reduced to counter-productive saber-rattling to express its discontent at U.S. arms sales and high-level diplomatic visits, while Taiwan races to strengthen its own defenses and reorient its economy away from overdependence on mainland China. In short, Xi Jinping’s approach to the “Taiwan issue” has turned into a strategic fiasco — one that may take years for Beijing to recover from...


The rest of this commentary appears at The Diplomat.
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Can Tsai Ing-wen Avoid the Second Term Curse?

6/23/2020

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If Tsai Ing-wen is superstitious, she should be worried: second term presidents in Taiwan appear to be cursed. Much like President Tsai, her predecessor Ma Ying-jeou started his second term on a confident and triumphant note. But over the next four years, he faced a relentless series of political crises, including an intraparty power struggle with Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng, massive protests against the death of a military conscript and construction of a nuclear power plant, and of course the Sunflower Movement occupation of the legislature, which effectively halted cross-Strait rapprochement with Beijing. President Ma’s approval ratings bottomed out at record lows, and he stepped down in 2016 on the heels of a sweeping electoral defeat of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), ultimately having accomplished little in his last years in office.

Somehow, Chen Shui-bian’s second term was even worse. The controversy around his re-election victory in 2004 robbed him of whatever political momentum he might have enjoyed, and he spent most of his remaining tenure fending off vicious partisan attacks, anti-corruption accusations in the press, massive street rallies by his opponents, and impeachment attempts in the legislature. In his attempt to keep core pro-independence supporters on his side, President Chen pursued a brash symbolic agenda that deliberately provoked the pan-Blue opposition, infuriated Beijing, alienated even potential allies in Washington, and left him politically isolated. In the 2008 elections, his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) paid a steep electoral price, and after his term was finally over, Chen ended up in handcuffs: the corruption accusations turned out to be true, and he was sentenced to a long prison term.

The rest of this piece continues at Taiwan Insight.
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George Washington University Roundtable on Taiwan Elections

12/9/2015

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I had the privilege yesterday of joining a two-panel roundtable session at George Washington University's Sigur Center for Asian Studies on the probable outcome and impacts of the upcoming Taiwan elections. Thanks to all who came to the event and asked great questions, and to Bruce Dickson for the invitation to participate.

I've gotten a couple requests for the slides from my presentation; they're linked here.

​The short version of the talk: reform of the Legislative Yuan should be at the top of the priority list for the next president. Outside of Taiwan, the potential twists and turns in cross-Strait relations dominate the conversation and tend to overshadow everything else happening in the domestic arena. But there are a lot of problems facing Taiwan right now that don't directly involve cross-Strait relations.

The incoming administration will face several daunting domestic policy challenges, including:
  • a low tax base combined with a highly uneven distribution of the tax burden;
  • widespread unhappiness with the Ma administration's China-first economic strategy, but no consensus about what to do instead, and long-standing opposition in the legislature to the kinds of domestic reforms required to enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership;
  • a declining defense budget, now at 2% of GDP, and rising personnel costs from the faltering transition to an all-volunteer military force;
  • a potential energy crisis driven by rising opposition to nuclear power without development of realistic alternatives. 

Whatever the next administration tries to do, it will face opposition from some corners of the legislature representing vested interests that would lose out under reforms. Under the Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng, the LY's cross-party negotiation mechanism has in practice given any party caucus--even one with just three members--the ability to block most legislation. So the current system will prevent major changes on any of these issues unless Speaker Wang is replaced and the negotiation mechanism is weakened or abolished. 

If the DPP wins a majority in the legislature, it will have a golden opportunity to reform the party caucus system and make it easier to pass legislation with a simple majority vote. It's critical for their own political future, for Tsai Ing-wen's, and probably for Taiwan's, that they do.​
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    About Me

    I am a political scientist with research interests in democratization, elections and election management, parties and party system development, one-party dominance, and the links between domestic politics and external security issues. My regional expertise is in East Asia, with special focus on Taiwan.

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