The Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region will host a virtual event tomorrow (register at the link), Tuesday, December 8 at 4pm, the Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Era.This event will cover some of the findings from a recent new book that I have co-edited with Yun-han Chu and Larry Diamond. We're fortunate to have three of the contributors to the book able to join us for the discussion. They are: 

Szu-yin Ho, Professor of Strategic and International Affairs at Tamkang University, Danshui, Taiwan, and the former  deputy secretary-general of the National Security Council during the Ma Ying-jeou presidency. He'll be speaking about the legacies of President Ma's cross-Strait policies. 

Austin Horng-en Wang, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UNLV. He'll provide some remarks about the emergence of Tsai Ing-wen as the unquestioned leader of the DPP during the Ma era. 

Shih-hao Huang, Post-Doctoral Fellow in political science at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. He'll present data that show the challenges the Ma administration had getting priority legislation approved by the Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, despite enjoying a large KMT majority there for both his terms. He will also compare legislative success rates under Ma to the Tsai Ing-wen era, and reflect a bit on what the differences can tell us about executive-legislative relations in Taiwan. 

For more on the book, and a link to the first chapter, see this previous blog post. 

This will be the last event of the calendar year for PTIP. Keep an eye out for announcements about our 2021 activities, coming soon. 

Finally, on a personal note, this event is my first as the Program Manger of the Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific. After being out of that role for over a year, as of November 1 I've stepped back in to take over the day-to-day management of the current incarnation of the Taiwan program at its new home at the Hoover Institution. Many thanks to Glenn Tiffert for his great stewardship of PTIP over the past year while juggling many other responsibilities--including, not coincidentally, the China Global Sharp Power project.    

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 American Political Science Association (APSA) annual conference was supposed to be in held in San Francisco this year, until COVID-19 hit. So, like everything else, it's moved online. That's probably just as well, because over the last month the Bay Area has turned into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of raging fires, record heat, and choking smoke. We've even broken some of the all-time temperature records that were set the last time APSA was in San Francisco, in 2017. Yay. At this rate it might be wise to put San Francisco (or anywhere in California, really) on the same repeat-offender list as New Orleans and never hold APSA here again. (Seattle has never looked better.) 

Anyway. It turns out we'll still have a strong lineup of Taiwan-related programming in the virtual conference. The Conference Group on Taiwan Studies (CGOTS) is sponsoring seven panels on Taiwan politics, spread out over four days (Thursday-Sunday, September 10-13, 2020). Details are at the CGOTS website, and reposted below. Note that you have to be registered for the conference to join the virtual sessions, but that they're otherwise open to all participants. If you'd like to see the latest Taiwan politics research, come check us out online.         

It's alive! This book volume on Taiwan politics during the Ma Ying-jeou years (2008-2016), which I've edited with Chu Yun-han and Larry Diamond, just arrived in the mail from Lynne Rienner Publishers this weekend.

This is our attempt at a deep dive into various aspects of Ma-era politics, including party politics and elections, political institutions and governance challenges, trends in public opinion and democratic values, civil society and social movements, and cross-Strait and US-Taiwan-PRC relations. This look at the Ma years parallels somewhat our earlier book on the Chen Shui-bian era.

We were fortunate to be able to assemble a great group of contributors for this book--about half based in Taiwan and half abroad--who offer a variety of perspectives on the politics of the Ma years. The scholarship here draws on years of conferences, papers, and conversations that started even before President Ma left office, including with some of the key participants in and outside of the Ma administration. (Chapter 15, for instance, is by Szu-yin Ho, who served for two years as deputy Secretary-General of Ma's National Security Council.) This sort of cross-national collaboration is less common than it should be (in part because it's logistically hard to pull off!), but I am convinced the final product is much stronger for it.  

Among the many great contributions here, let me especially highlight three that provide original, provocative answers to important questions about the Ma era:

• In Chapter 3, Austin Wang explains how Tsai Ing-wen emerged from obscurity as unrivaled leader of the DPP during its years in opposition, despite having never previously held elected office;
• In Chapter 4, Nathan Batto shows how President Ma's recurrent troubles with the legislature had more to do with deep divides within the ruling KMT than they did with the obstructionist tactics of the opposition DPP and with Ma's party rival, Speaker Wang Jin-pyng;
• In Chapter 7, Isaac Shih-hao Huang and Shing-yuan Sheng demonstrate that having a majority in the Legislative Yuan does not mean a party has complete control over the Legislative Yuan, and that the legislature's decentralized law-making process makes it challenging for the executive branch to get high-priority legislation approved, whether or not the president's party holds a majority. 

For more thoughts on those issues and a broader overview of the book, check out the introductory chapter, which is available ungated from the publisher's website. 

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. 

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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."  
5. 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.

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.

No. At least, that's my prediction in this piece on Taiwan's party politics in the run-up to 2020 over at Taiwan Insight. Here's an excerpt:

"Taiwan’s party system is unusual among young democracies for its stability. In 1992, the Kuomintang (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) finished first and second in elections for the Legislative Yuan. In 2016, they finished second and first, and in the six elections in between, neither party ever finished outside the top two."

"The KMT and DPP are also well-institutionalised. They have centralised party organizations that integrate local branches into a hierarchical national structure. Both have many loyal supporters who make up a significant share of the electorate. Both have staked out distinct positions on the ‘China question’—the most fundamental divide in Taiwanese politics. And, despite going through major reversals of fortune at different times, each remains today the primary threat to unseat the other in almost every election. For better or worse, Taiwan has effectively been a KMT-DPP duopoly for the entire democratic era."

Piece continues here. 

8:00 AM – 9:30 AM, Friday, August 30. 2019 (Washington Hilton, Fairchild East) 
Panel Title: Reunderstanding Cross-Strait Relations: The Status Quo? The One-China Policy? 
Chair: Robert Sutter, George Washington University 
Discussants: Scott Kastner, the University of Maryland and Kuen-Da Lin, Georgia Institute of Technology 

• "A Neo U.S. One-China Policy? Content Analyzing Obama’s and Trump’s Positions," Dean Chen, Ramapo College of New Jersey; Yao-Yuan Yeh, University of St. Thomas 
• "The Polarization of Cross-Strait Relations since 2016: the Status Quo at Stake," S. Philip Hsu, National Taiwan University 
• "The One China Policy and the International Status of Taiwan," Mikulas Fabry, Georgia Institute of Technology 
• "Nationalism, Alliances, and Geopolitics: US-China-Taiwan Ties under Trump and Xi," Vincent Wei-cheng Wang, Adelphi University 

10:00 AM – 11:30 AM, Friday, August 30. 2019 (Washington Hilton, Fairchild East) 
Panel Title: New Theories and New Evidence: Studies of Turnout and Election in Taiwan 
Chair: Hans Stockton, University of St. Thomas 
Discussants: Timothy S. Rich, Western Kentucky University and Nick Lin, Academia Sinica 

• "Declining Voter Turnout in Taiwan: A Generational Effect?," T.Y. Wang, Illinois State University Christopher H. Achen, Princeton University 
  
• "Reverse Coattails Effects and Electoral Fortune in Taiwan’s Local Elections," Kuan-chen Lee, Academia Sinica Karl Ho, University of Texas, Dallas 
  
• "Critical Citizens or Electoral Losers? A Panel Study of 2018 Taiwan’s Election," Hsin-hao Huang, National Taiwan Normal University 
  
• "The Impact of Polling Primaries on Electoral Performance," Eric Chen-hua Yu, National Chengchi University 

12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, Friday, August 30. 2019 (Washington Hilton, Fairchild East) 
Panel Title: Public Opinion Research in Taiwan: Old Topics and New Angles 
Chair: Da-Chi Liao, National Sun Yat-sen University 
Discussants: Lu-Chung Dennis Weng, Sam Houston State University and Ching-Hsing Wang, National Cheng Kung University 

• "Democratic Deficit in Taiwan? A Longitudinal Study of Corruption Perception," Chilik Yu, Shih Hsin University 
  
• "Presidential Popularity in Taiwan: from Ma Ying-jou to Tsai Ing-wen," T.Y. Wang, Illinois State University; Su-Feng Cheng, National Chengchi University 
  
• " 'Return' of Chinese Identity? Exploring Some Recent Developments," Shiau-chi Shen, Soochow University 
  
• "Public Support for the Use of Force in Weak States," Kuan-Sheng Wu, Purdue University; Yao-Yuan Yeh, University of St. Thomas Fang-Yu Chen, Michigan State University; Austin Horng-En Wang, Duke University 

2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, Friday, August 30. 2019 (Washington Hilton, Fairchild East) 
Panel Title: Legislative Politics and Emerging Social Issues in Taiwan 
Chair: David An, Catholic University of America/Global Taiwan Institute 
Discussants: Wei-ting Yen, Franklin and Marshall College and Fang-Yu Chen, Michigan State University

• "Election Cycle and Roll Call Requests: Identifying the Target Audience," Weihao Huang, Academia Sinica Greg Chih-Hsin Sheen, London School of Economics and Political Science 
  
• "Electoral Rules, Party Discipline, and Parliamentary Questions in Taiwan," Nick Lin, Academia Sinica; Jinhyeok Jang, National Sun Yat-sen University 
  
• "Unpacking LGBT Acceptance in Taiwan: What Explains Taiwan’s Public Support?" Timothy S. Rich, Western Kentucky; University Isabel Eliassen, Western Kentucky University 
  
• "Court as Political Evasion: The Case of Interpretation No. 748 in Taiwan," Yu-Hsien Sung, University of South Carolina; Chin-shou Wang, National Cheng Kung University 

4:00 PM – 5:30 PM, Friday, August 30. 2019 (Washington Hilton, Fairchild East) 
Panel Title: Social Media, Big Data Analysis, and Electoral Politics in Taiwan 
Chair: Christopher H. Achen, Princeton University 
Discussants: Eric Chen-hua Yu, National Chengchi University and T.Y. Wang, Illinois State University 

• "How Connective Populism Was Made Online--A Case Study of the Han Tide in 2018," Da-Chi Liao, National Sun Yat-sen University; Frank Liu, National Sun Yat-Sen University 
  
• "Social Media and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Taiwan," Chia-hung Tsai, National Chengchi University; Ching-Hsing Wang, National Cheng Kung University 
  
• "The Effect of Social Media on Vote Choice: The Case of Taiwan," Lu-Chung Dennis Weng, Sam Houston State University; Chi Huang, National Chengchi University 
  
• "The Interaction between Politician and Netizens in Facebook: A Big Data Approach," Yu-Wei Hu, Chinese culture University; Jung Chun Chang, SOAS, University of London 

6:30 PM – 7:30 PM, Friday, August 30. 2019 (Washington Hilton, Fairchild East) 
Conference Group on Taiwan Studies (CGOTS) Business Meeting 

Wow. So, Taiwan had local elections this weekend, and the DPP got beat. Badly. I'm not surprised at the direction of the vote swing--away from the DPP, toward the KMT--nor that it was pretty consistent around Taiwan, but I am surprised at the size of the swing. The races in Taichung and New Taipei were not even close, and Han Kuo-yu's win in Kaohsiung is just stunning--he won 892k votes, which is just 100k less than what the DPP's Chen Chu won in 2014.  

I'll have some more thoughts on the election results and what they mean later this week. For now, I want to revisit what I wrote in advance of the 2018 local elections  for Taiwan Insight, with five questions for election night. How did things turn out?   

1. Can the DPP Hold on in the Special Municipalities? 
Uh, no. This result was just about the worst of all plausible outcomes for the DPP given the state of the race in the last week. Going in I thought it more likely than not that Lin Chia-lung would come up short in Taichung, but losing 57-43% is on the low end of what was possible. I also expected the DPP's traditional partisan advantage in Kaohsiung to carry Chen Chi-mai through despite the Han Kuo-yu hype, so Han's 54%-45% margin of victory is just incredible. Losing both those races alone probably sealed Tsai Ing-wen's fate as party chairwoman, but then the DPP also lost winnable races in Chiayi City, Taitung, Changhua, and Yunlin, and only won with 38% in Tainan (!!); given the magnitude of the defeat I don't see how she could have stayed on. President Tsai is, indeed, now facing a much more precarious path to reelection in 2020.

2. Can the KMT Finally Get Its Act Together Again? 
Close enough. This was, undoubtedly, a great night for the party and a vindication of sorts for chairman Wu Den-yi. The KMT's candidates won in Chiayi City, Hsinchu County, Taitung County, and Kinmen  despite the presence of renegade pan-blue candidates, and it pulled off convincing wins in the special municipalities of New Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung. On the down side, in Taipei, Ting Shou-chung didn't do any better against Ko Wen-je than Lien Sheng-wen did in 2014, and he fell just short of winning a three-way race, continuing the KMT's rather surprising recent weakness in the capital city. So Ko will remain in the spotlight and can potentially complicate any KMT challenge for the presidency in 2020 if he decides to run. Also, the jockeying for the KMT's presidential nomination in 2020 just got more complicated: in addition to Wu, Han Kuo-yu's rapid ascent has thrust him into the conversation, and Eric Chu, Wang Jin-pyng, and even former President Ma Ying-jeou kept high profiles during the closing days of the campaign. With Tsai and the DPP looking more vulnerable than most observers expected they would, the value of heading the KMT ticket in 2020 just jumped.

3. How Many Councilor Seats Can Third Parties Win? 
Not many. The one small party to have some success in the local council races was the New Power Party (NPP), which won 16 seats around the island and has established itself more firmly than ever as the third party in the party system, after the DPP and KMT. But it fell short of the 20 it was aiming for, and it will still hold less than two percent of all council seats. The other old small parties fared quite a bit worse and appear to be in terminal decline: the PFP managed to win eight seats, the TSU five, and the New Party only two. The much bigger story was the resilience of the KMT in local races: it reversed a long decline in local councils and picked up eight seats this cycle. It will now form a majority in nine councils, including Kaohsiung. Rather than a realignment or breakup of the party system, this election suggests that the DPP-KMT duopoly remains entrenched. Much like in 2014 and 2016, when public opinion swings against the ruling party, the primary opposition rather than third party candidates is the main beneficiary.

4. What Happens if a Referendum Actually Passes? 
We're about to find out: seven did, including the two anti-LGBT measures that directly conflict with the Council of Grand Justices ruling in 2017. The only one that will take direct effect is the elimination of the nuclear phase-out amendment to the Electricity Act passed by the DPP in 2016, because it overturns an existing law. All the others will require additional action by the executive or legislature, and it's not clear what will happen if the government doesn't act.

5. Can Taiwan's Election Management System Hold Up under Pressure? 
Barely. Despite similar turnout to 2014, there were long lines to vote in many precincts--unusual for Taiwan. The inclusion of 10 referendums really put the Central Election Commission under strain: it had to decide which referendum questions were legal to put on the ballot, to verify signatures, to design procedures for 18-19 year olds to vote (but only for referendums!), and to count an unprecedentedly large number of ballots.   
   

​Cross-posted from the Conference Group on Taiwan Studies website

The Conference Group on Taiwan Studies is a Related Group of the American Political Science Association. For this year's annual conference in Boston, CGOTS is sponsoring three special panels on Taiwanese politics. In addition, we encourage all APSA attendees to drop by the Conference Group on Taiwan Studies reception, Thursday, August 30, from 7:30-9:00pm in Marriott Salon K. Free (!!!) drinks and hors d'oeuvres will be served.   

All CGOTS members are also invited to attend our annual business meeting, to be held right before the reception from 6:30-7:30, next door in Marriott Salon J. We'll go over budget and membership numbers and nominate the new CGOTS leadership team. 

Please also check out the three official CGOTS panels, as well as other Taiwan-related presentations at the conference; details and a schedule can be found at the CGOTS website.