Category: Xi Jinping

Previewing the 2022 Campaign: Some Concluding Thoughts

8/16/2022

Counting ballots, January 11, 2020.

For the rest of this preview, see: Part I. Part II. Part III.

Summing up, here's the ratings as of August 16:

Safe KMT (2): Kinmen, Lienchiang
Likely KMT (6): New Taipei, Hsinchu County, Nantou, Chiayi City, Hualien, Taitung
Leans KMT (8): Taipei, Taichung, Keelung, Hsinchu City, Miaoli, Changhua, Yunlin, Penghu
Toss-up (1): Taoyuan
Leans DPP (1): Yilan
Likely DPP (1): Pingtung
Safe DPP (3): Tainan, Kaohsiung, Chiayi County

By way of conclusion, here are five observations on the 2022 local elections three months out:

1. The KMT is down but not out. There is now a frequent refrain among outside observers that the KMT is just hopelessly disorganized and dysfunctional and cannot mount a serious challenge to the DPP anymore, until and unless it changes its position on cross-Strait relations. Maybe. But going through race by race here suggests the party's candidates are still very competitive in local elections. By my own count, I have the KMT nominee favored right now to win in 16 of 22 localities -- that's more than they control today.

Perhaps I'm being too generous to the blue camp here -- and after adding the numbers up I'm feeling a wee bit uncomfortable with how lopsided they are -- but one can at least make a reasonable case that the KMT will hold a majority of local executives after these elections, IF (big if) the national environment doesn't turn against it. Despite a rough few years, the party still has significant residual strength at the local level, and reports of its impending demise have been greatly exaggerated.

The latest data from NCCU ESC shows KMT partisans at a record low.

2. HOWEVA, there is a lot of downside risk for the KMT. Since 2014, all local elections in Taiwan have been held concurrently. As a result, outcomes across races have been more correlated than they used to be. The last two election cycles have produced big swings against the party in power: in 2014, President Ma Ying-jeou's approval ratings were under 20 percent, and the DPP flipped seven counties and cities as part of an anti-KMT wave election. In 2018, Tsai's ratings were under 30 percent, and the KMT swept all the competitive races except for Taipei, where Mayor Ko barely hung on.

In this election cycle, the KMT is playing defense: they hold 14 of the 22 local posts and will do well just to keep that number. More than six years into her presidency, Tsai Ing-wen has defied the second-term curse and her approval ratings have been positive for most of the last two years. The KMT's party ID numbers have fallen far behind the DPP (the latest NCCU/ESC polls have DPP identifiers at 31% of respondents, and the KMT at a record-low 14%.) And US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in early August has triggered an extended round of military exercises and bellicose rhetoric from Beijing that has put the KMT on the defensive again. As the "China-friendly" party in Taiwan, the KMT has traditionally suffered politically when the salience of the threat from the PRC increases. (This is arguably a big part of the reason Tsai Ing-wen was re-elected in 2020.)

It's possible that a natural disaster, a worsening COVID situation, a new government scandal or two, or just a general weariness with the DPP could drag down the central government's popularity over the next three months. But if Beijing's military exercises and pressure campaign on Taiwanese agricultural products continue, they are likely to help the DPP and hurt the KMT. In addition, the CCP's 20th Party Congress will likely happen sometime in November [update 8.30: it will begin earlier, on Oct 16], where expectations are that Xi Jinping will be confirmed for a third term as General Party Secretary. Not since 1992 has this meeting been held around the same time as a major Taiwanese election (the 14th Party Congress was 12-18 October, and the LY election was 19 December), and, depending on what is said about Taiwan there, it has the potential to trigger another public opinion backlash in Taiwan against the PRC, much like Xi Jinping's January 2, 2019 speech to "Taiwan compatriots" led to a rebound in Tsai Ing-wen's approval ratings.

So, despite having a strong slate of candidates for local office, the KMT could easily lose most of the competitive races if the salience of cross-Strait relations remains high through the fall.

3. Nominations are half the battle. Both major parties moved away from the polling primaries method they've used in the past to select nominees, and instead empowered the chair to "negotiate" or hand-pick nominees in most races. The DPP has done this a lot during the Tsai Ing-wen era; one of her political gifts is effectively managing the intra-party fights over offices and spoils in a way that keeps everyone onside. She's mostly succeeded at that again here, although the party's slate of nominees as a whole seems rather underwhelming to me. Despite their recent success at the national level, the DPP still doesn't have a deep bench of local politicians who have built up grass-roots networks and can play the factional game as well as the KMT. And in places like Chiayi, Yunlin, or Changhua, winning that game can still be decisive.

On the KMT side, Eric Chu had a couple well-publicized nomination fiascos in Taoyuan and Miaoli. But in most of the other races, the party has recruited well. Chu's task has been made easier by having incumbents to renominate in many races, which has helped head off the kind of factional squabbling that has bedeviled the party in the past. It's especially notable that with popular mayors running again in Chiayi City, Changhua, and Yunlin, the KMT is well-positioned to hold on in several jurisdictions that have become reliably "green" in national elections.

Both major parties still face threats in several races from spoiler candidates from the minor parties, the NPP and TPP. The NPP is now firmly in the pan-green camp, and the presence of its nominees will almost certainly hurt the DPP more, as they did in the 2020 legislative elections. The TPP is new to local politics this cycle, and it is trying to position itself as more centrist than the KMT. It could erode support for or even eclipse the KMT, as some recent public polling has shown it might; but given the long track record of third party candidates in Taiwan underperforming in elections relative to early polls, I'll believe it only when I see it.

4. Does the amendment to lower the voting age have a chance? Unlike in 2018, there’s not going to be referendums held alongside the local elections. There will, however, be a vote on a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age, from 20 to 18 years old. There is no open partisan opposition to the amendment, which passed the legislature 109-0 on March 25. But it does require the support of half of all eligible voters to take effect -- not just half of those voting. With an electorate of 19.3 million, that means 9.65 million yes votes are required for approval. So it will need high turnout in the local elections, and even so it is far from certain the proposal will get enough support to pass the threshold. This is the first time the voters will decide on a constitutional amendment since the new procedure was adopted in 2005.

5. Year of the Woman? I was surprised at just how well-represented women are in both parties this cycle. Either the KMT or DPP has nominated a woman in 2 of 6 special municipalities, and 10 of 16 other races. In 3 races (Nantou, Changhua, and Hualien), both candidates are women. Taiwan rightly gets a lot of attention for having a woman as president and increasing representation in the legislature (41% in 2020, up from 38% in 2016). But the numbers at the local level are also striking: one can easily imagine a result in 2022 where women end up leading a majority of Taiwan's localities, in Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, Yilan, Hsinchu City, Nantou, Changhua, Chiayi City, Yunlin, Pingtung, Hualien, and Taitung.

That’s all the more impressive because the cabinet still looks like this:

And the top of Taiwanese academia looks like this:

And the business world still looks like this:

Electoral politics really is a women’s profession in Taiwan, which makes it exceptional in the region, and a nice contrast to Japan and Korea, and of course these guys across the Strait:

For more on how women came to be so prominent in Taiwanese elections, check out this explanation from Huang Chang-ling about Taiwan's gender quotas and their long-term effects on women's advancement in politics. Nathan Batto also has a great paper on this topic.

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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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Taiwan 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 alarming each 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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How Taiwan Stands Up to China

7/15/2020

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I have a piece out in the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy on Chinese efforts to influence Taiwan politics, and why they failed in the January 2020 elections. After the DPP lost badly in the 2018 local elections, there was a lot of speculation (see, e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) that Beijing would be emboldened by these results and expand its efforts to sway the 2020 campaign and turn President Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP out of office, or failing that, would find ways to delegitimize the results and destabilize Taiwan's democracy. In the end, that didn't happen: Tsai recovered from a politically shaky first term to win an even larger share of the vote than in 2016, the DPP held onto its legislative majority, and Tsai's main opponent, Han Kuo-yu of the KMT, openly conceded defeat on election night.

In the article, I lay out several reasons why these fears did not come to pass in 2020, and why Taiwan's democracy has repeatedly proven resilient to PRC pressure campaigns.

The CCP is still pretty bad at influencing public opinion: Beijing's covert influence operations have been surprisingly clumsy, badly disguised, and at odds with the long-term goals of Taiwan policy under Xi Jinping.
Partisanship can be a good thing: The high salience of the China factor and Taiwan's partisan divides make it hard to execute the kind of United Front-led, covert and coercive activities that the CCP favors for most of its influence operations elsewhere in the world.
State capacity lives: The Taiwanese state is still quite capable of responding effectively to the threat of foreign interference in elections when it takes them seriously, and the 2018 elections provided a belated wake-up call to this danger.
A free society helps: Taiwanese civil society, including parts of the media and NGOs, as well as private social media companies, managed to mitigate the impact of disinformation. Facebook, for instance, took down over a hundred Han Kuo-yu fan pages the month before the election for "inauthentic activity."
Low-tech elections are an important backstop for democracy: Taiwan's election management system is very low-tech, but it is also transparent, accurate, efficient, fast, and fair. (For more details, see here.) Nobody disputed the election results, shocking as they were to some of Han Kuo-yu's core supporters who had believed the polls were fake and that Tsai would lose. The high trust in the voting and counting process had a lot to do with that.

The full article is available via Project Muse, and access is free through August 15, 2020.

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TDP Seminar: Cortez Cooper on December 1

11/30/2015

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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.

Abstract
During the recent meeting between PRC President Xi Jinping and Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, the “1992 One China Consensus” served as a mutually acceptable paradigm for maintaining “peaceful and stable” conditions across the Taiwan Strait. For Xi Jinping, the warmth of the visit thinly veiled a message to Taiwan’s leaders and electorate, as well as to onlookers in Washington. Chinese officials and media clearly link the talks and confirmation of the 1992 Consensus to “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”—a concept that is increasingly unpalatable to many in Taiwan. Xi hopes to keep DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (and perhaps even future KMT leaders) in the 1992 Consensus “box” and to co-opt the U.S. in this effort, but perhaps underestimates the political transformation underway on Taiwan.

The Xi administration has also hardened its position regarding “core interests” such as Taiwan, embodied in a “bottom line principle” policy directive that eschews compromise. Although many commentators and most officials across the region have shied away from stating that the PRC and Taiwan are at the crossroads of crisis, the collision of political transformation on Taiwan and the PRC’s “bottom line principle” will challenge the fragile foundations of peaceful cross-Strait co-existence. Changes in the regional balance of military power brought about by a more muscular People’s Liberation Army compounds the potential for increased friction, providing Beijing with more credible options for coercion and deterrence.

This talk will consider the politics and principles involved in cross-Taiwan Strait relations in light of the upcoming 2016 Taiwan elections and the policies of the Xi Jinping administration; and will discuss some of the possible implications for China’s national security policy, regional stability, and the future of cross-Strait relations.

Bio
Mr. Cortez A. Cooper III joined RAND in April 2009, providing assessments of security challenges across political, military, economic, cultural, and informational arenas for a broad range of U.S. government clients. Prior to joining RAND, Mr. Cooper was the Director of the East Asia Studies Center for Hicks and Associates, Inc. He has also served in the U.S. Navy Executive Service as the Senior Analyst for the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific, U.S. Pacific Command. As the senior intelligence analyst and Asia regional specialist in the Pacific Theater, he advised Pacific Command leadership on trends and developments in the Command’s area of responsibility. Before his Hawaii assignment, Mr. Cooper was a Senior Analyst with CENTRA Technology, Inc., specializing in Asia-Pacific political-military affairs. Mr. Cooper’s 20 years of military service included assignments as both an Army Signal Corps Officer and a China Foreign Area Officer. In addition to numerous military decorations, the Secretary of Defense awarded Mr. Cooper with the Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 2001.

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The Ma-Xi Meeting: Long on Symbolism, Short on Substance

11/5/2015

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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.

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Previewing the 2022 Campaign: Some Concluding Thoughts

Testimony for US-China Economic and Security Review Hearing

China's Military Incursions Around Taiwan Aren't a Sign of Imminent Attack

How Taiwan Stands Up to China

TDP Seminar: Cortez Cooper on December 1

The Ma-Xi Meeting: Long on Symbolism, Short on Substance

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