Pre-election jitters

We adopt an orange tabby cat!; plus details on the NATSA conference and a roundtable on decolonizing Chinese identity

“Sea of clouds” near Alishan on New Year’s Day.

Dear readers, Happy New Year! We’re sorry we’ve been out of touch for a bit — December was perhaps the most hectic month we’ve had since arriving in Taiwan two and a half years ago.

Michelle here.

Albert and I are very, very, very nervous about the elections this Saturday. All signs point to a really close election, and the outlook doesn’t look great for the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). It doesn’t seem likely that the DPP will retain its majority in the legislature. There’s a fair chance that it will lose control of the presidency altogether. 

Long-time readers of this newsletter know our politics. But in the past couple of weeks we have gained quite a few new readers, and we’d like to be transparent about why we support the DPP to retain power. 

On the surface, this election should be a slam dunk for the DPP. Outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen has presided over a transformative eight years. Under her watch, Taiwan had one of the most successful responses to the COVID pandemic globally. She oversaw the legalization of same-sex marriage, increased the international stature of Taiwan, and kept an increasingly aggressive China at bay. Taiwan is performing well on almost every economic indicator—Taiwan’s GDP per capita GDP recently surpassed South Korea and has almost caught up with Japan. Despite these achievements, the margins among the three parties are thin. The Kuomintang (KMT), which imposed martial law for nearly forty years, is close behind. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), popular with young men, is polling third.

So why is the election so close? Chinese infiltration is one reason. Chinese agents wage cognitive warfare against Taiwan, fund disinformation campaigns, and create deep fakes. They lure local officials with all-expense-paid trips to China. They purchase fake accounts on Youtube, Tiktok, and Facebook to spread disinformation. They use TikTok to target youth—there are 5.5 million TikTok users in Taiwan—and spread Chinese propaganda that almost exclusively attacks DPP candidate William Lai; videos predict that if Lai is elected, the U.S. will launch a war. Pro-Chinese news sources in Taiwan outnumber their pro-Taiwan counterparts by a factor of almost ten.

The goals of China’s campaign? To sow doubt about the value of democracy itself. Taiwan is a giant thorn for Beijing for one reason: democracy works here. One of the CCP’s central claims is that democracy is incompatible with Chinese-speaking societies. Taiwan’s very existence undermines that claim.

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To be sure, the tight election can’t be blamed on China alone. The DPP’s biggest opponent is fatigue. For decades a dissident party that forged its identity as the underdog, after eight years in power it is now considered the establishment. It has been mired in a series of corruption and #MeToo scandals. It has been unable to address the central sources of malaise that plague youth in Taiwan face today: long working hours, low pay, unaffordable housing, and disparity between the mega-rich and everybody else. By most accounts, it’s this failure that drives some youth voters towards the TPP.

In other words, there’s a disconnect between how the international community views Taiwan and how people in Taiwan feel about their situation. I got a sense of this divide in conversations with my students. My non-Taiwanese students, who make up roughly a third of my college courses, waxed poetically about the state of Taiwanese democracy. One Dutch student, who had despaired over a right-wing demagogue being elected back home, tells me with heartbreaking sincerity, “I see Taiwan as a beacon of hope. It sounds hokey, but I really do.”

Everywhere, he continues, there are crackdowns on dissent, in Russia, China, the Middle East, Africa, even Europe. Taiwan is an oasis. As a gay person, he’s astonished to find that queer people aren’t merely allowed to exist here; they play an active part in public life. Compared to surrounding countries—Korea’s “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, Japan’s culture of homophobia—this is remarkable.

My students from Southeast Asia are even more emotive. A quiet woman from Thailand cries as she tells me of what had happened in her country. It’s dangerous to even click “like” on a social media post that criticizes the king; you can get arrested for “defaming the monarchy.” A Filipino student, also queer, says he first learned about Taiwan when it legalized same-sex marriage. It was an “inspiration and source of courage to its neighbors.”

How do my Taiwanese college students feel about their country being a receptacle of such longing? Equivocal, anxious, a bit evasive. They talk about housing, stagnant wages, and a possible military confrontation with China. They believe the two major parties have forgotten them. The DPP’s inability to retain and stoke the idealism of young people is one of the main stories of this election cycle. 

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Meanwhile, both the KMT and the TPP have advocated for closer ties with China. Their pledge to pass the cross-strait trade pact that ignited the Sunflower Movement is troubling. Launched by university students in 2014, that revolutionary movement drew half a million people to the streets. It successfully stopped the pact from being implemented. This secretive agreement orchestrated by former President Ma in 2013 would have opened up sixty-four industrial sectors in Taiwan to China—accounting for 70% of Taiwan’s GDP and five million Taiwanese workers. According to reports, the actual increase in economic growth would be miniscule. As publisher Rex How has written in Taiwan Unbound, this would have profound implications for freedom of speech; China-based conglomerates could simply buy up book-related businesses in Taiwan. Progressive literature and media would disappear. “From the CCP’s perspective,” he writes, “it’s easier to buy Taiwan than to bomb it.”

For new observers to Taiwan, this may be puzzling. Why would a voter vote to get absorbed by China? Wouldn’t that mean they’re voting to end their right to vote? But that’s not how they see it. Besides the lure of the Chinese markets, some voters believe that if you play nice with China, they won’t bother you; calling oneself “Taiwanese” is a provocation to war. Others consider themselves Chinese: a vote for the KMT is a vote to retain one’s Chineseness. One day, they believe, China will be free, and annexation will be harmless. And a remaining lot, frankly an unpleasant sort, will tell you China is wealthier and better, and that authoritarianism keeps everyone safe and orderly. If you ask them whether they’re afraid that the police will ever come for them or their children or grandchildren, they’ll say only troublemakers end up in jail. For them all that glitters is gold.

The KMT’s presidential ticket has a whiff of authoritarian nostalgia. The presidential candidate Hou You-ih was the head of police under martial law; his vice-presidential candidate, Jaw Shaw-Kong, as legislative member in the 1990s voted to keep on the books a draconian sedition law executing people for advocating Taiwanese independence. Paradoxically, the KMT’s persistence reflects how remarkable this democracy is. On this densely packed island, legislative floors have contained pro-democracy activists and the party that incarcerated them—yet it has not managed to implode. This is a portrait of resilience and co-existence.

Meanwhile, “Chineseness,” once so divisive, has receded somewhat, in part because the KMT knows it can’t win on this issue. Overwhelmingly young voters think of themselves as Taiwanese. Scholars date the collective self-recognition as Taiwanese to the first presidential election of Lee Teng-hui in 1996, and its acceleration with the election of Chen Shui-bian in 2004. For young people born after 2000, Taiwanese identity is self-evident and has lost its political edge.

But for people born in my generation, I know that coming to a Taiwanese identity is an awakening, a hard-fought battle. Long ago, if you’d asked my ethnic background, I might have said, “Chinese—I think?” This may strike you as idiotic—how could I not know my own background?—yet many living in Taiwan will recognize my confusion instantly. “I had no idea what I was,” a Taiwanese anthropologist my age told me. For her, “Taiwanese” is a hard-won political identity construction that embraces a revolutionary, anticolonial struggle against violently imposed identities—first to be subjects of the Japanese empire, now to be subjects of the Chinese. As I come to know this centuries-long struggle, it has become a political act and, dare I say, an act of liberation, to call myself Taiwanese American. The DPP isn’t a perfect political party, but it’s the only one that takes seriously the claim that “Taiwanese-ness” stands for a liberatory identity. It’s the only political party that will regularly stake out progressive positions—such as opposing the death penalty—even if reality forces them to turn away from that political vision. 

But regardless of how the election shakes out on Saturday, I’m convinced that civil society here is strong. What proof do I have for such optimism? For starters, there are activists for every cause you can think of: they liberate the wrongfully convicted, fact-check legislative speeches, fight to abolish the death penalty and demand that archives from the period of martial law be released. This creative freedom emerges from four decades of a dizzying array of social movements, including labor, indigenous, feminist, and environmental protests. There’s an instantly recognizable character to a particular sort of progressive in Taiwan. They refuse to be seduced by lucrative markets. They do not abide by state violence. They reject ethnonationalism. They support LGBTQ+ rights and feminist movements. And they protest economic “development” if it threatens public health, environmental justice, and indigenous rights. Whether the DPP wins or not, the activists I know have said they’ll keep fighting the good fight.

And for all our Taiwanese friends—please go vote this Saturday!

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We adopt an orange tabby kitty

Albert and Michelle here. We are all in love with this kitty, especially no-longer-baby-P., who wakes up asking to see him. I (Michelle) still sneeze quite a bit around him but the cuddles are worth it. Our friend Jackie came up with the name “小地瓜,” which translates to Little Yam or Little Sweet Potato.

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Some quick links

• The 2024 North American Taiwan Studies Association Annual Conference call for proposals is out. The conference will be June 11-13 in New York City, and its them is “Taiwan Studies Matters: Worlding the Contested Frontier.” Here’s the link to the CfP, and proposals are due January 15. In particular, the organizers want to encourage undergraduates to submit to the undergraduate paper competition, due March 11, 2024.

• Check out this brilliant roundtable on decolonizing Chinese identity in The Historical Journal, edited by Gina Anne Tam, with contributions by James Millward, Catherine Chou, Taomo Zhou, and James Gethyn Evans. In particular, Catherine exposes how “the allure of the ‘one China’ narrative…ends up being used as justification for the island’s takeover today by another, more powerful Chinese state.”

• Finally, if you’re interested in understanding Taiwan's presidential elections and how the past eight years have led us to this precarious moment, a must-read book is Rex How (郝明義)'s Taiwan Unbound: A New Chapter, published this fall in Mandarin and just released in English as an e-book. We had to edit on a tight deadline (pre-election!) and know this isn't perfect. But Rex is a wonderful prose stylist in Mandarin, and his lucid thinking shines through in English.