A teary-eyed post-election missive
A party with radical roots wins an unprecedented third term
Albert here. It turns out a lot of our pre-election jitters were unwarranted. Kind of, sort of? You can read Michelle’s take at The Guardian, where she describes accompanying her parents to the polls on a gorgeous Saturday morning.
The top-line story coming out of this election: the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) wins a historic third consecutive term. Since 1996, when Taiwan held its first direct presidential election, no party has controlled the presidency for more than eight years. This win cements a shift that has been decades in the making: the transformation of the DPP into the establishment party.
This is a stunning reversal. As recently as 2008, the DPP looked like a party on the verge of collapse. Rocked by corruption scandals during Chen Shui-bian's presidency, the 2008 elections were a far-reaching humiliation for the party. The DPP presidential candidate lost by almost 20 points. The party lost 62 seats in parliament. The victorious party, the KMT, along with its pan-blue coalition, held a supermajority. An hour after Chen Shui-bian left office in May 2008, he was arrested, and the images of him being cuffed were meant to discredit the entire DPP apparatus.
In the ensuing sixteen years, the DPP has risen like a phoenix from the ashes. The main architect behind this resurrection: Tsai Ing-wen. While I'm loath to rely on the "great (wo)men of history" theory of politics, it may apply here. In 2008, Tsai took over as party chair and substantially reformed the party. The details of this story will be written by future historians, but I think Brian Hioe has the general contours right when he characterizes Tsai—an academic trained in international trade law—as a neoliberal technocrat. She executed her vision brilliantly. To gain power, she pushed the DPP into more centrist positions on Taiwanese independence. Her technocratic centrism appealed to big business, which had traditionally distrusted DPP politicians because it feared that the DPP would rock the boat with its hard-line stance on independence. At the same time, she coopted the energy of socially progressive activists—dominated by young people fighting for economic justice, transitional justice, LGBTQ rights, and a more expansive social safety net.
Perhaps most importantly, Tsai transformed the image of the DPP. Forged in the tangwai movements that opposed martial law, the DPP in the late 80s and early 90s was propelled by left-leaning radical ideas—Taiwanese independence, social democracy, and collective action. While it had already begun to moderate its positions by the time Chen Shui-bian won the presidency in 2000, its opponents continued to attack the DPP as radical trouble-makers, subversive activists intent on disrupting cross-strait relations. At the same time, the KMT doubled down on rejecting the turn towards “Taiwanese” identity. In 2001, the party expelled its former chairman and President Lee Teng-hui from its ranks for being too pro-Taiwan. It also attacked Chen Shui-bian’s “Taiwanization” policies, seeing them as rooted in a reactionary, uncultured, ignorant, and local mindset, as opposed to the KMT’s (allegedly) more cosmopolitan and worldly outlook.
In the past sixteen years, at least in the international sphere, Tsai Ing-wen has rehabilitated the DPP’s image. Once defined in the Western media as "trouble-makers," the DPP is now seen as the party committed to international engagement, liberal democracy, the international human rights regime, and multilateral cooperation. Certainly, you still see this lingering mistrust of the DPP in international media; the headlines in the wake of DPP’s victory have framed Lai Ching-te as a risky choice who will ratchet up tensions with China. This is simply incorrect. Throughout the campaign, Lai has said he would follow Tsai’s lead, and she has been admirably disciplined in her dealings with China. Meanwhile, the positive image of the DPP in Western media has been aided by China’s authoritarian and inward turn, coupled with an increasingly anti-China consensus in Washington. In turn, the KMT's “all-our-eggs-in-the-China-basket” approach looks narrow and single-minded.
Still, the DPP’s transition into this outward-looking, international political party has come at a cost. In Taiwan itself, the DPP, once the party of the people, has looked increasingly like the party of big business. It has been wracked by a series of political corruption scandals connected to kickbacks. Once the party of the youth, it has lost their trust. As Rex How explains in his recent book Taiwan Unbound, the party's big moment of betrayal came in 2017, when the DPP put the full force of its government behind the revision of the Labor Standards Act. Analysts have shown that the law was more favorable to employers than workers. The DPP's revisions led to massive, at times violent, protests on the streets by young people.
Will the DPP be able to solve the conundrum of balancing its progressive populist roots with its centrist liberal political interests? I think this will be the central problem facing the DPP in the future.
The sense of betrayal that youth feel towards the DPP partly explains the second big story of the night: the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) outperformed expectations. With almost no party apparatus, Ko Wen-je won almost four million votes. This is an enormous number, and even though he didn’t win the presidency outright, Ko can arguably be seen as the main victor. We'll need more exit polls to back up this impression, but it seems as if the TPP's main support came from young people disillusioned with the DPP. The TPP rally that we attended (briefly, with dread) on Friday night was filled by young people—live streamers, strollers, children in costumes, people chanting and holding all sorts of creative signs. More than 200,000 people attended. Only time will tell if Ko Wen-je is skilled enough of a politician to channel that energy into an actual party structure.
And what does this mean for the KMT? While it lost its third consecutive presidential election, it flipped several seats in the legislature and now is the biggest party in parliament. Coupled with the major victory in 2022, when KMT swept the local elections, the KMT continues to be very competitive in local elections, as factional interests tend to come into play.
But this is also a major transformation for the KMT. Even as it continues to play a major part in local politics, its stance on Taiwanese sovereignty is at odds with mainstream public opinion. The KMT's overt pro-China policies makes it unthinkable for many to vote for them. Many people to whom we spoke—among them KMT supporters—were turned off by former president Ma Ying-jeou's ill-advised interview with Deutsche Welle two days before the election. Ma said that the people of Taiwan need to trust Xi Jinping. This was a breathtakingly silly thing to say, especially on the eve of an election. From what we can tell, there is a faction within the KMT that wants to take a harder stance on China. Whether the KMT will follow that line will be something to trace the next couple of years.
One smaller story that Michelle and I have been following closely: the races of progressives who gained their political careers from the revolutionary Sunflower movement of 2014. If you talk to any progressive today, they’re pretty bummed out about the election results. Aside from a couple of exceptions, such as Wu Pei-yi who won Taipei-5, almost all lost. We were particularly invested in the candidacy of Miao Poya, one of the first openly lesbian city council members in Taipei, who emerged during the Sunflower movement. She’s charismatic and passionate, and she represents our district. We've been inspired by her tireless campaigning and clear-eyed progressive vision for the future of Taiwan. As Chen Yen-Han writes, “Years ago, it was unthinkable for a young LGBTQ woman who is also an outspoken human rights and anti-death penalty activist to run a competitive campaign in Da’an.” Though she lost, her district is notoriously tough.
As we near the tenth anniversary of the Sunflower movement, it seems that for the moment, the energy has either dissipated or been absorbed into different causes. The New Power Party, a progressive third party that came out of Sunflower, was obliterated this time around. The overwhelming defeat of the Sunflower generation shows how far we have to go to building a progressive majority in Taiwan. In its stead, an elitist misogynist flip-flopper gained more than 25% of the votes, and his party gets to play kingmaker in parliament. (Since neither the KMT and the DPP have a majority in parliament, they will have to form a coalition of some sort with the TPP.) The forces of reaction are still strong in this country.
But I would hate to end on this pessimistic vote. Like always, Michelle and I were inspired by the practice of democracy in Taiwan. Saturday was beautiful, sunny, and temperate. We strolled down to our voting station—housed in a local high school—and saw multi-generational families lining up. Elderly people being wheeled by their children. Young parents pushing their babies in strollers. Not-so-baby P. joined us on her balance bike, and even she seemed to understand something sacred was happening as she wheeled around, waiting for Michelle’s parents to finish voting. When the polls closed at 4 P.M., we went to observe the vote counting. Everything was open and transparent. Watching the orderly process of voting, I was reminded of stories my elders told me of ballot stuffing and outright vote-buying in the 1980s and 1990s, and I marveled at how far we had come.
A few hours later, I watched Hou You-ih and Ko Wen-je's concession speeches on television and attended the DPP's victory rally. I kept thinking back to Chen Shui-bian's surprise victory in 2000. After he won, there were rumors that the military would launch a coup to prevent the DPP from taking office. There were real doubts about whether there would be a peaceful transfer of power. Some feared the worst. In 2004, Chen Shui-bian was grazed by a bullet; for a moment, people thought elections would be called off, and the country would disintegrate into chaos.
I remember thinking throughout those times: I just want to live in a normal country. Yesterday I kept marveling at how normal everything felt. I kept thinking about heroes like Chen Chu, who were jailed in their fight for freedom, and how they must feel when they cast their votes. We've come a long way.
On a different note, as somebody who’s been observing election coverage of Taiwan for decades, I could never have imagined the level of nuance that international reporters have brought to this election cycle. Taiwan Twitter is very good at reminding us that these reports aren’t perfect. Certainly, there’s room for improvement, but it’s simply unprecedented for Taiwan to receive such attention and complexity in its international press coverage. Of course, journalists are interested in whether there will be a war with China. But I’d like to think it’s something else too. I believe they find our story worth telling because they encounter in this country something truly inspiring. In spite of all obstacles, our people have created and nourished a robust democratic culture.
There was one moment when I felt moved to tears. At around 10 P.M. at the DPP victory party, everybody was starting to file out. But Hsiao Bi-khim, overtaken by the moment, stayed on stage. The announcer spontaneously started a new chant, 副總統好, “Hello Vice President-elect!" Hsiao kept waving and bowing. That’s when I struggled to keep back my tears. In 2015, Michelle and I met Hsiao Bi-khim for coffee in Hualien. She was about to embark on a tough legislative campaign in Hualien that she would eventually win. She told us that she wasn’t confident about her chances, but she was going to keep fighting. We were impressed by her commitment to improving the lives of individuals. She had heard of a program led by Donghwa University students, who went to teach underprivileged elementary student in rural Hualien. Since these communities were mostly located in rural areas with windy roads, many students would get into motorcycle accidents. On her own initiative—without lobbying from Donghwa—Bi-khim convinced Luxgen to donate a mini-bus to the university for the purposes of ferrying these students to underprivileged communities.
We talked about her fascinating life path, the obstacles she had to overcome as an outsider to Hualien, her hopes and dreams for a more democratic and just Taiwan. Now she’s our vice president and one of the most fierce and eloquent advocates for Taiwan's place in the world. How unlikely a path, how Taiwanese a story.
We've mentioned before that the lead-up to this election has been "sleepy." Part of this has to do with my own platonic ideal of Taiwanese democracy in the late 90s. I remember the country’s first direct presidential election in 1996, the Taipei mayoral election of 1998, and the presidential election of 2000. Those are some of my formative memories, when my love for Taiwanese democracy was forged. Part of me misses the wild energy, the 熱鬧 (renao, bustling, liveliness) of democracy in the 90s—the unending firecrackers, the messy chaos of election flags everywhere, on crowded skybridges and sidewalks. But I know this is just wistful nostalgia. Taiwanese elections are still 熱鬧; they just appear in different form, through different media. At the victory rally on Saturday night, celebratory voters took selfies and videos in front of a big digital screen of the candidates. After, they helped staff to pick up trash and stack chairs.
The orderly, inspiring experience of the voting process yesterday made me think for the first time, My gosh, we're more than a normal country—we’re an extraordinary country. Let's hope we’re even better four years from now.
The last 24 hours have found me close to tears as well, and now again by the loving yet clear-eyed tribute you bring in this post. My lived experience of Taiwan reaches back to 1980, when in the confluence of my linguistic and cultural naivete, an almost equal disdain for the CCP and KMT, and aspirational idealism for a democratic Taiwan, there was a kind of pervading intellectual loneliness that the Taiwan for which *I* aspired was perhaps a fiction. So, so much has changed, and while there remain anxieties about the security of Taiwan, and many frontiers within the nation into which democracy must continue to extend, you and Michelle time and again confirm what is increasingly evident to the world community: that Taiwan’s story is one for us all. And yes, so many more are drawn positively to that story. Notwithstanding the DPPs missteps in local governance, we have so much to be grateful for Tsai Ying-wen’s transformational leadership and influence. Hsiao Bi-khim brings intellect, clarity and humanity to the role of leader, and yes, Miao Po-ya is such an anchor to the vision of Taiwan’s democracy!
Fantastic summary of the progression of democracy in Taiwan 👏🏽