Paranoia, Polarization and Suicide:
Interpreting Taiwan’s 2004 Presidential Election
Edward Friedman
1 A metropolis is a place where strangers stay up all night and, at the end of the night, they are still strangers. Yet, even in a metropolis, if it rains, if it storms, when the skies are threatening, the metropolis turns into a small town. People watch out for each other; they care for each other and help each other. The metropolis becomes a small town, like New York City after 9-11, or London during the blitz.
Given the threats Taiwanese face from China, one might expect Taiwanese similarly to join together. But instead, as the morass after the 2004 presidential election makes manifest, the Taiwanese people turned against one another, seemingly heedless of the real threat to the survival of Taiwan’s democratic autonomy. Their discourse was paranoid. They seemed polarized. Was it suicidal? Why don’t Taiwanese pull together as in a small town?
A leading Taiwanese political scientist notes, “One of the negative results from the election was a deepened division within Taiwan. Ethnic tensions have increased.”
“Taiwan’s society has never been so divided … we see hatred and mistrust … That’s not healthy when the government needs to form a consensus over cross-Strait relations”
(Chao, pp. 38, 39).
Nationalist Party (KMT) election posters of the blue camp portrayed President
Chen Shui-bian, leader of the green camp, as Hitler and Osama Bin Laden. Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP) election posters portrayed the blues as on the side of an alien tyranny. With the DPP running as the representative of people with a separate Taiwanese identity, its opponents, known as the blues, are portrayed as outsiders, “as the ally of the
CCP,” the enemy of Taiwan’s democracy. Only the DPP and its allies, known as the
2 greens, can save Taiwan. Loyal Taiwanese blues, irate at the green’s portrayal of them, see the green president, Chen Shui-bien, as a dishonest purveyor of “hatred” “who would do anything to win an election” (Chao, p. 41). Despite ultimate dangers, Taiwanese are split and treat each other as strangers.1
In his second inaugural, President Chen responded to this paranoid polarization.
He acknowledged a “wall of antagonism” and “animosity,” a “deep divide caused by mistrust.” He projected a future Taiwan under his leadership as “an ethnic rainbow” replete with “a myriad of cultures,” “a tolerant oceanic country.” He urged Taiwanese of the “diverse immigrant groups on Taiwan” to “relinquish our differentiation between native and foreign, and between minority and majority.” He called on Taiwanese “to transcend … ethnicity, lineage, language and culture, and to build a new and unified sense of shared destiny,” a “’New Taiwan’ family.” In the president’s speech, no theme got anywhere near the attention of the need to end ethnic hatred. The president’s one off the cuff remark during his inaugural commented on the downpour that day. He prayed the rain would cool down passions in Taiwan.
But the president offered no policies to end Taiwan’s paranoid polarization. At a
May 2004 conference on Taiwan about Taiwan consciousness and national security, a leading Taiwanese political analyst, Professor Lin Wen-cheng, found that “Taiwan’s society was torn in two parts.” He worried that “if the rupture continues to be enlarged, it will become the biggest danger to Taiwan’s stability and security.”
1 While the hegemonic political discourse was one of polarization, in many ways Taiwanese were far from frozen at two ends of a political spectrum. Many were in flux. Many rejected both poles. At local levels, the identities and issues that mattered had nothing to do with a blue-green split. And, on issues, the tendencies in the two camps gravitated toward a centrist and moderating convergence.
3 This tendency, identified by Taiwanese analysts as suicidal, is puzzling. Before
Taiwan’s 2004 presidential election, analysts tended to describe Taiwan’s democracy as consolidated. A political miracle starting in the 1980s had followed an economic miracle starting in the 1950s. By 2000, Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan’s president, and leader of the
KMT, constitutionally surrendered presidential power to the opposition DPP, headed by presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian. A defeated Leninist party peacefully transferred power. It indeed seemed a miracle.
In office, President Chen worked to change the nation’s military from a politicized instrument of the Leninist KMT to a national army loyal to the constitution and to the commander-in-chief who was elected by democratic procedures. President
Chen has called that achievement his greatest (Hsueh, p. 157). Taiwan peacefully moved from a military police state headed by a Leninist party to a flourishing democracy with a robust civil society. It seemed an awesome achievement.
Given this idyllic picture, the violent rages which roiled Taiwan after the razor thin 2004 re-election of President Chen came as a shock. The defeated blue camp led by
Lien Chan and his vice presidential running mate Soong Chu-yu (James Soong) head of the People’s First Party (PFP) denounced Chen’s victory as unconstitutional and anti- democratic, demanding that the election be nullified.
The blue leaders did not call for a court-run recount, with a promise to abide by the results of a recount. That request would have been normal and redound to the credit of the blues and strengthen the constitutional order. Defeated KMT presidential candidate Lien Chan instead told his followers on May 20, 2004 that their KMT was the heir of Sun Yat-sen who in 1913 had led a second revolution to overthrow an illegitimate
4 coup-maker, Yuan Shikai. To Lien, the Chen government is more a tyranny than a democracy. On April 7 Lien’s vice presidential running mate urged supporters to break in to the Presidential Palace on April 10, sacrificing their lives for justice if need be
(Hille).
Although Taiwan’s “tabloidized” media played up the ensuing violence, and television showed over and over isolated moments of violence, in fact, the society was tranquil. 99.9 percent of the people went about their ordinary lives in totally normal ways even during the moments when a few militants perpetrated minor acts of violence.
Outsiders, including analysts in China, speaking of a need to end the chaos, reflected an outsider’s mesmerization by the media’s fixation on isolated violence, the distorting view that “if it bleeds, it leads.” In fact, order on Taiwan was never threatened.
Or was it? Throngs of core blue camp supporters, including numerous previously quiet middle class citizens, echoed and intensified the charges, that Chen had stolen the election, that he ran a terroristic regime, that he was imposing totalitarianism on the
Taiwanese people. Such extreme anxieties are, however, not a monopoly of the blue camp.
A similar paranoia also infused the green camp headed by President Chen. His
DPP was allied with the Taiwanese Solidarity Union (TSU) which rallied around former
Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui, who, in 2000, abandoned the blues and was drummed out of the KMT. The greens were not persuaded that the KMT, the old authoritarian ruler, was truly committed to a democratic, peaceful transfer of power.
With the blues trying to nullify the 2004 presidential elections with violence and slander, the greens worried that the blues were trying to get the George W. Bush
5 administration in Washington to prod Taiwan’s military into a coup to oust President
Chen, as also desired by the Communist Party in China. Blue leaders called for a suspension of the constitution, emergency rule, and military intervention. The blues were seen as plotters and traitors. The greens feared that the Bush administration would try to do to Taiwan’s President Chen what Bush had supposedly already done recently in both
Haiti and in former Soviet Georgia, that is, replace a sitting, elected president with someone friendlier to the American President’s interests.
The greens had welcomed Bush’s election, assured by American neo- conservatives that he would be supportive of Taiwan’s independent democracy. They were shocked when Bush, as all previous U.S. presidents, put America’s global interests, in this case, its global dealings involving Pakistan and North Korea, ahead of Taiwan.
Great power China could deliver for the American president because of Beijing’s leverage over Karachi and Pyongyang what a small and powerless Taiwan could not, no matter how wonderfully democratic Taiwan was. The greens also saw the cosmopolitan blues as knowing their way around Washington and the world in ways that a home grown camp of inexperienced greens could not match.
The greens worried that Taiwan’s democracy, as Hong Kong's fledgling democracy previously, would be the victim of a coalition of local elites, the CCP and a foreign power privileging ties to China over a democratic project of a powerless people.
As conservative American China specialist James Lilley explained, on his first trip to
China, Henry “Kissinger in private assured the Chinese that the U.S. recognized that
Taiwan was part of China…” (p. 164). Even Ronald Reagan humiliated Taiwan, “caving to Chinese pressures” (p. 228). The CIA, Lilley reports, “favored a strategic relationship
6 with China over any commitments to Taiwan… Taiwan was seen as an obstacle, if not an albatross to improving relations with the PRC. Taiwan became a hyphenated term with a pejorative: Taiwan-problem…” (p. 234). There was also, Lilley continues, a “China- leaning group at [the Department of] State.” Former President George Herbert Walker
Bush, said to be the son’s adviser on China policy, averred, “You have got to remember where the big relationship is. It is with China, not Taiwan.” (p. 242). China had gotten
President George W. Bush in December 2003 to publicly rebuke Chen’s administration, while the Chinese premier sat at Bush’s side and beamed.
When Chen won re-election, Douglas Paal, the American representative on
Taiwan, did not immediately congratulate him, but instead stayed in touch with both camps. In so doing, according to political scientist Huang Jing, speaking for the National
Committee on U.S.-China Relations on March 22, 2004, “he [Paal] took 50 percent of the legitimacy of Chen Shui-bian away and gave it to the Pan Blue. To former U.S.
Ambassador to China J. Stapleton Roy, Bush’s policy had become “strong affirmation of the one-China principle [making Taiwan part of a China ruled by the CCP], opposition to
Taiwan independence …,” supposedly in contrast to President Chen (Taiwan).
Beijing announced after Taiwan's 2004 presidential election that it had the right to send troops to Taiwan to maintain stability. On March 23 the Chinese Foreign Minister called the American Secretary of State, urging him to “ensure peace and stability” in
Taiwan (Hague, p. 17), which to the CCP meant a Taiwan not ruled by President Chen.
Soon Douglas Paal’s counterpart in Washington, Therese Shaheen, who had congratulated President Chen on his re-election, resigned, with American neo-cons reporting “that the Chinese government had targeted Mrs. Shaheen” (Gertz). Next
7 Taiwan’s Minister of National Defense offered to resign, according to the rumor mill, because he no longer wanted to be approached by wishful coup-makers. A DPP personage who had served high up in the Ministry of National Defense declared that, “a reactionary attempt at overthrowing democracy” was afoot. A Washington neo-con noted that some in
Washington…are succumbing to the ‘Munich temptation’ – as when, during the 1938 Czechoslovakia crisis, blame was put on President Benes when someone else more intimidating but less malleable was driving the threats. Today’s Benes is Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian (Waldron).
The DPP may have been paranoid, but, as with numerous overthrown presidents,
Schevrenadze, Aristides, Diem, Allenda, and Benes, even paranoids had real enemies.
As with the martyred heroes of the Warsaw Uprising in World War II, great power interests could abandon even the most noble of causes. The greens, having seen the blues running to Beijing and Washington ever since Chen’s 2000 election were worried about traitors on Taiwan. In addition, almost a quarter of a million Taiwanese males had taken mainland Chinese wives and 20 percent of Taiwan’s college graduates saw their future in
China. Taiwan's economy was increasingly dependent on China’s. The greens did not conclude that Taiwan’s fledgling democracy was consolidated.
The paranoia pervading both political camps had not been predicted. Taiwan, on the evening of March 21, the day after the presidential election, seemed a different universe from the Taiwan idyllically imagined on the morning before the election. But were the extraordinary events of March 19th through the 21st, the shooting of the
President, his razor thin victory margin, and the violent rejection of the election by a furious blue camp, the sudden cause of extreme mistrust? Or was the image of Taiwan as
8 a political miracle and a consolidated democracy a fraud? Perhaps the image was a foreign policy playing of a democracy card, an understandable tactic to counter China’s isolation of Taiwan. Perhaps Taiwanese and their foreign friends had been taken in by their own propaganda.
National identity is hotly contested on Taiwan, and has been, as greens experience it, since the February 28, 1947 massacre of Taiwanese by the KMT military forcibly imposing its dictatorial will on the Taiwanese people. Yet a popular and politically potent separate Taiwan identity did not take root or spread widely until after the 1979
Meilidao incident in Kaohsuing when the KMT rejected a dangwai (the camp of people outside the ruling KMT) appeal for political democracy and citizen equality and instead, as with 2-28, began a crude repression of Taiwanese thinkers and activists. Only after that rejection of loyal Taiwanese by hard-liners in the KMT did a quest for Taiwanese roots begin to become presuppositional throughout Taiwan. Until then, the dangwai were mainly a loyal Chinese opposition. Only after the KMT repression of 1980-81 did a
Taiwanese nationalistic consciousness have a broad enough credibility to re-imagine the island’s history such that mainland Chinese occupiers after World War II became merely the latest (hopefully the last) of foreign conquerors who did not care about the fate of the
Taiwanese people. That new identity shocks, outrages and alienates the blues who identify with a Republic of China (ROC) that has a glorious history going back to Sun
Yat-sen and the 1911 overthrow of the Manchu monarchy.
While ever fewer Taiwanese, especially among the young, have a purely Chinese identity, there actually is no polarization between Taiwan identified citizens and those identified with both Taiwan and China. Individuals in each camp understood identity in
9 personal, nuanced and complex ways. Most of the greens, including independistas in the radical wing of the DPP and even outside the DPP, still treasure kinship ties to ancestral roots and temples and ways of life on the mainland. By the twenty-first century, among the ever growing number of third generation blues who say they are both Taiwanese and
Chinese, identification is real with Taiwan as a beloved home of unique achievements.
For Taiwanese who went to ROC schools and learned to think of themselves as proudly Chinese, and for Taiwanese in jobs and networks dependent on KMT patronage, this sudden rise of a Taiwanese identity, however, seemed frightening. The clash of communities is not the singular result of events surrounding the 2004 presidential election. It is the outcome of Taiwan’s history, a history obscured by the fantasy of democratization on Taiwan as a consolidated political miracle of the Taiwanese people, mainlanders and native Taiwanese alike.
In fact, on arriving in Taiwan, the KMT saw colonialist Japan’s impact on Taiwan as an annihilation of Chinese culture. The KMT ended that. Its deepest legitimation was preserving Chinese civilization while Mao on the Chinese mainland attacked
Confucianism and undermined Buddhism and Taoism. The KMT, in contrast, supported
Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist temples. It is unbearable for blue preservers of
Chineseness to find greens deSinicizing the Republic of China. It feels like a rejection of all the KMT has stood for, as if the magnificent collection of Chinese art and artifacts in the great national museum on the outskirts of Taipei could be replaced by primitive aboriginal remains.
In addition, for those in the blue camp, losing political power feels ultimately unfair. They experience business, mostly Taiwan-owned, as already not hiring or
10 promoting their children. With a loss of access to political patronage since Chen’s 2000 electoral victory, blues feel they are victims of racist exclusion, that their adversary, much like Hitler to the Jews, threatens to extinguish their line. They speak of their families as being driven into the sea. There seems no future for blue progeny in a green
Taiwan.
The blue leadership faces a dilemma. Even the old guard leadership knows that by the twenty-first century most Taiwanese so identify with a separate Taiwan that the
KMT cannot win an island-wide election without establishing its Taiwanese bona fides.
Yet the blue camp’s core base of support is with the shrinking minority that identifies with Chinese culture and sees Taiwanese as low class bumpkins.
The blues see Taiwan cultural identity as a nativistic reduction of a great Han
Chineseness to, at best, mere Fujianization. But the blues dare not say this out loud. It would confirm their arrogant condescension toward locals and thereby alienate voters.
Greens see the blues’ attitude toward them as racist condescension, similar to Afrikaner apartheid views of blacks in South Africa.
The contradiction that the blue camp lives within was manifest in the speech of their presidential candidate, Lien Chan, on the day of President Chen’s second inaugural.
KMT chairman Lien described Chen as holding an “ideology of racial totalitarianism” employing “Fascist and Nazi methods,” yet, at the same time, insisted that Lien’s people in the KMT were “part and parcel of Taiwan as an organic entity” and embrace Taiwan as a multi-ethnic “land of beauty.”
The blues rage at green victories as if they were illegal coups. They already rioted at KMT headquarters in Taipei following Lien Chan’s crushing defeat by Chen
11 Shui-bian in the 2000 presidential race. To many KMT stalwarts, Vice President Lien had lost only because President Lee had betrayed Lien and secretly supported the DPP presidential candidate, Chen Shui-bian. When Lee moved to head the TSU, a most radical part of the green camp, blues felt vindicated in their analysis. Cheating and trickery explained the KMT defeat by green economic naives who were violent radicals.
The KMT had built the Taiwan economic miracle. The KMT was Taiwan’s natural ruling caste. Merit and nature joined to guarantee that truth, justice and power should all lie with the KMT. Yet since President Chiang Chung-kuo’s death, Lee Teng-hui,
Chiang’s successor, had tricked Chiang and the blues and been disloyal to the ROC heritage. The blues felt themselves the innocent victims of sinister plotters.
With the DPP in control of the presidency, the KMT suddenly found that
President Lee, upon replacing Chinag Ching-kuo, had been amending the democratic constitution of the ROC to concentrate extreme power in the presidency so Lee could pass on anti-democratic and anti-constitutional power to his fellow Taiwanese, the DPP’s
Chen Shui-bian. By fraud, Taiwan had lost any balance of powers. Chen’s victory, therefore, to the blue camp, seemed illegitimate, a coup, the loss of Taiwan’s precious democracy initiated by the KMT under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang
Chung-kuo, the real initiator of Taiwan’s democratization, a democracy endangered by sneaky, power-grabbing greens. To the blues, whatever they did was therefore on the side of democracy, while the greens were inherently anti-democratic. In the minds of the blues, no matter that it was blues who in fact rioted, the rioters, by their very nature, were the greens, who supposedly were constitutionally incapable of controlling their emotions.
12 From this KMT perspective, President Chen had to be opposed so that the democratic ROC constitution would survive. Chen quickly proved they were right, that he and his DPP had no respect for the ROC constitution. The greens stopped construction of a new nuclear power plant despite the opposition of the legislature dominated by the KMT, which then went to court to block Chen’s unconstitutional action. It won (Lin, pp. 64-65).
The Taiwan economy slumped at the start of the twenty-first century, as blues saw it, because of ignorant and inexperienced DPP mismanagement, not because the IT- dependent Taiwan economy was badly wounded by the bursting of the American dotcom bubble. The blues mindset interpreted events to explain why only the blues deserved to rule. In general, political parties tend to work this way everywhere. But, on Taiwan, such ordinary polarizing paranoia can seem suicidal to the nation.
Chen’s administration seemed laughable and dangerous to the blues. Chen re- titled the street in front of the Presidential Palace, giving it the name of a Taiwanese aboriginal tribe. As seen by the blues, the irrational DPP were treating the party of the blues, people who had long lived in harmony with the diverse communities on Taiwan, who had the electoral backing of indigenous voters and of the Hakka minority, as not even members of the national community. The greens were experienced by the blues as replacing ethnic harmony with ethnic hatred. The greens, as seen by the blues, invented a risible mythology of how Taiwanese culture was the fruit of contributions by aboriginal settlers, Dutch colonists and Japanese imperialists, thereby marginalizing China’s glorious civilization. The blues in contrast saw themselves as having brought a tolerant and unifying Chinese culture to Taiwan.
13 The Chinese KMT and their Taiwanese supporters way of telling Taiwan’s story, however, was dismissed. Instead, the new rulers of the DPP spoke their language, what blues called minnan, a regional Chinese dialect, as if it were a national language what
DPP militants called Tai-gi, Taiwanese. Uncomprehending mainlanders and Hakka and aborigines as well as some minnan speakers long attached to KMT networks felt excluded, bewildered and terrified. Most could not even understand how the conspirators conspired in their incomprehensible, so-called language of Tai-gi.
The blues felt themselves victims of a green terror, an unconstitutional coup, a rejection of democracy, sanity and security. To the blue camp, a joining of all forces was needed to rid Taiwan of President Chen. All would be lost if President Chen were re- elected in 2004.
The blues set out to make Chen’s re-election inconceivable. They forged a coalition of the candidates who came in second and third in the 2000 race. Based on support received in 2000, the blues began the 2004 campaign with 60 percent of the vote.
Since 2000, blues reasoned, their supporters must have risen beyond sixty percent since the green camp had mismanaged the economy. The greens also lost trade with China and jobs by provoking Han patriots in China through an insulting tale of Taiwanese multiculturalism. The greens had even endangered the very survival of Taiwan. Their separatist discourse prodded the CCP to ever more seriously consider military action against an anti-China DPP-led Taiwan. The blues were Taiwan’s salvation. The greens meant death for Taiwan’s democracy – suicide! The voters would understand, and then return power to the blues.
14 The blue camp’s fears were reconfirmed by President Chen’s 2003-2004 promotion of referenda during the 2004 presidential election. The greens provoked the
CCP, this time by insisting that their goal was a new constitution to perfect Taiwan’s sovereignty. The DPP president acted unconstitutionally, the blues insisted, by ignoring the need for legislative support for a referendum. But President Chen, finding a need to respond to a pressing Chinese security threat, put referenda on the ballot during the presidential election. Since the blues saw no new and imminent threat, as the referenda legislation required, they saw the greens playing a high stakes, and again unconstitutional, game of political football. The greens seemed irresponsible.
President Chen’s disruptive actions even alienated Taiwan’s military guarantor, the U.S.A. Chen responded to American pressure by changing the contents of the referenda to mere innocuous questions over whether China’s missile build up was a threat to Taiwan and whether Taiwan should purchase weapons from the USA to defend
Taiwan, merely a statement of America’s long existing policy, not a response to a security emergency. The blues ridiculed the greens for undermining Taiwan’s democratic constitution, for provoking the Chinese and for alienating the Americans.
And for what?
The answer was not for Taiwan’s security. The goal of the referenda was to mobilize President Chen’s base of support. What the blues saw, what they had been seeing since they were cheated out of victory in the 2000 presidential election, indeed since Lee Teng-hui fooled Chiang Ching-kuo into thinking Lee was his loyal follower, was that the greens would do anything to win power, even if it meant the suicide of
Taiwan’s autonomous democracy. Taiwan was threatened by an anti-democratic
15 totalitarian populism undergirding green party terror excluding the blues as traitors, even forcing blue leaders to kiss Taiwan’s soil and pledge their fealty to Taiwan in order to survive politically in the nativistic atmosphere fostered by the greens.
As the sun rose on May 19, 2004, the morning before the presidential election and the voting on the referenda, powerful passions were on fire. The events of the 19th and the 20th, the shooting of the president and his re-election by 0.228 percent of the vote, (a number, 228, whose significance was lost on few Taiwanese) were oil thrown on that already raging fire. The fairy tale of a peacefully consolidated Taiwan democracy, a political miracle to match the economic miracle made believe the real world of polarized paranoia did not exist.
Paranoid polarization pervades the two political camps. All of the just mentioned blue interpretations are understood differently by the greens. Since 1947 they have been the lower caste victims of a racialist order. As in an apartheid racist society, mainlanders looked down with contempt on Taiwanese culture. Taiwanese locals seemed inferior, laughable, contemptible. Greens were treated as less than full citizens, as people devoid of adult reason, both by the old KMT and its heirs among the blues.
Such racialism infused life. Permit me to offer trivial personal experiences. Forty years ago, as a graduate student living for three years in a dormitory at Taiwan
University, I was walking with a Chinese mainlander friend when, a monster sized cat jumped across our path. I commented, “What a large cat!” My Chinese walking companion brushed my remark aside. To him, nothing of significance could be indigenous to Taiwan. He said, “Big? Big? If you want to see large cats, go to the mainland. In China we have large cats.”
16 Another time, walking with another mainlander, we passed beautiful flowers. I noted, of the beautiful flowers, “What beautiful flowers.” The response from my Chinese interlocutor to my pointing out that beautiful flowers were indeed beautiful was that beauty could not be native to an uncultured Taiwan. My friend said, “Beautiful flowers?
Beautiful flowers? If you want to see beautiful flowers, go to China. On the mainland we have beautiful flowers.”
The everyday discourse of mainlander family members and of people educated
(greens might say “brainwashed”) in the era of KMT authoritarianism made Taiwanese identify with and be proud of a Chinese culture which treated Taiwan demeaningly as an uncultured frontier. Some blues will not even utter the new aboriginal name of the boulevard in front of Taiwan’s Presidential Palace. Living myself in a city with four lakes, all with native American Indian names, greens seem multicultural. On Taiwan, as in most of the modern world, much healing is needed to rectify wrongs done to indigenous peoples, victims of the modernizing nation state. Taiwan has gone further in that direction than almost any nation. Brilliant indigenous peoples are becoming masters of their own destiny, alphabetizing all their languages so their children will be eased also into learning English so they can succeed in our globalized world. They are also succeeding in stopping the project of Taiwanese as a national language, instead treating the Hokkien of the Hoklo as just one of Taiwan’s many languages.
When I see the indigenous people of Lanyu, (Orchid Island), freely re- establishing ties with their own people in the small northern islands of the Philippines, the Batanes, I see it as a post-modern democratic glory in which the scars of modernizing nation-state wars on indigenous people begin to heal. But what Chinese identifiers see,
17 rather, is a stupid, fictitious effort of irrational and inferior Taiwanese to replace the great and glorious civilization of China with a petty, nothing culture. Humane Taiwanese efforts are experienced by Chinese as racism, a Taiwanese racism, a racism of morons.
These structured green and blue perspectives are products of Taiwan’s history.
They are not the consequence of the unique events of the 2004 presidential election.
Given these passions, no matter what Taiwanese President Chen says, China-identifiers feel his cultural policy is aimed at destroying their superior Sinic heritage. The razor-thin presidential election of 2004 did not cause those passions. Rather, deeply structured pre- existing experiences facilitated the violent outbursts against the election results by ordinary people who identify with the blues and who long since had found the DPP capable of prejudiced behavior and illegal power grabs.
Despite the blue discourse of portraying the greens as a Nazi-like racist populist totalitarian terror, Taiwan’s democracy actually fosters cultural and religious toleration and promotes careers open to talents and arrests, represses and deports no one based on some ascribed category of community identification. The greens, please remember, because the greens do remember, did not find such even-handedness in the era of blue authoritarianism.
For the greens, democracy and freedom have allowed the Taiwanese people to reclaim their long-repressed heritage. Their illiterate grandparents, speaking only Hoklo in the authoritarian age when their mother tongue was forbidden in movies, radio and television, had been totally marginalized, publicly silenced, fined for speaking it in classes. Using their own language, hearing their own language in the age of democracy means an end to humiliation. It feels empowering. Taiwanese now write history
18 dissertations to reclaim and recapture the long suppressed reality of Taiwaneseness.
They introduce courses on Taiwanese literature into university curricula. It is a joy of democracy that they proudly assert their Taiwanese identity in all realms of life.
The blues experience this Taiwan identity as a nasty exclusionism. Excesses are real, an ordinary part of identity movements all over the world, although, it is doubtful if
Taiwan identity politics can compare to the arrogance of Great Han chauvinism. But, to
Chinese cultural identifiers, Taiwanese-identified people are idiots and Chinese-identified people are rationally proud. Blues feel the same way that some teachers of Shakespeare feel when they are told in America that their Department will now include wonderful black women writers such as the glorious Zora Neale Hurston as central cultural creators in the curriculum. As this last analogy indicates, much in Taiwan’s polarized paranoia embodies ordinary political and cultural forces and angers and is not peculiarly
Taiwanese.
Taiwan’s political cultural clash is an ordinary experience for a nation amidst a democratic transition where an ethnic minority dictatorship comes to an end. Analysts of democratization tend to find that among the most difficult societies to democratize are minority community authoritarianisms like the Sunni dictatorship in Iraq or the Afrikaner apartheid regime in South Africa. In a democracy, numbers count. Taiwan’s previous blue rulers whose core is an ethnic minority of about thirteen percent of the population, are terrified of future decisions made by those who can mobilize numbers based on a separate Taiwanese identity. The new rulers in such polities, whether Iraqi Shi’a or
South African blacks, are seen by the previous ethnic minority authoritarians as unworthy. Consequently, the old ruling community, if it is to be won over, needs to be
19 courted and even given special assurances. Stability demands concessions for reconciliation. Nelson Mandela did this for European South Africans. The USA had a hard time learning that it should similarly conciliate the Sunnis, the base of Saddam’s tyranny. The cost of not courting the heirs of the ethnic minority dictatorship is high, although it seems unnecessary, counter-intuitive and ridiculous to the new rulers who sincerely want to see justice done. It is therefore almost natural that President Chen Shui- bien’s DPP is focused not on assuaging the mainland Chinese but on making Taiwan fair for all its people, ending the remnants of institutionalized KMT unfairness.
Yet the elite perpetrators of the prior authoritarian horrors who long unfairly advantaged their own community during the dictatorship have to be reassured if democratic conciliation is a priority agenda item, as it should be, if stability is a high priority. While Mandela was conciliatory in South Africa, he was an exceptional leader.
Taiwan’s President Chen is not evil, as the blues maliciously describe him. But he is no
Nelson Mandela. Few are.
But the blues are also to blame for Taiwan’s polarized paranoia. They rejected an all-party government. Since 2000 and the initial election of President Chen, the blues have not only rejected offers of grand coalitions but they have stymied, subverted, stalled and sabotaged every initiative of the president’s aimed at national cooperation. Seeing the greens as strangers and believing the greens see them as stronger, the blues have since
2000 refused to imagine Taiwanese as living in a small town facing a common threat.
They see the greens as the priority threat. Consequently, the harsh difficulties inherent in democratizing an ethnic minority dictatorship unleashed hate-filled emotions long before the 2004 presidential election.
20 Taiwan’s paranoia and polarization with their potentially suicidal consequences are also intensified by the institutional logic of the inherited voting system. Students of electoral democracy find that worst case fears and anxieties are generated among ethnic minorities by First Past the Post (FPP) voting systems where minorities win no seats with less than a plurality, since the winner takes all the power. The president of Taiwan’s centralized state is elected in just this FPP manner. Demography, history and institutions have conspired to make reconciliation very difficult on Taiwan.
In addition, democratic nationalism anywhere can have a nasty racist core which terrifies old elites. Given how much modern democracy follows upon feudal-like cultures which comprehend character in terms of blood, the division and tensions in
Taiwan experienced in virtually racist ways actually are quite common place. What makes Taiwan different is not the nasty forces inside its politics but the international context, the threats to the survival of Taiwan’s democratization from China. It is that which makes quite normal, yes, normal paranoia and polarization into something potentially suicidal.
The structured tensions in Taiwan society are repeated all around the world.
Similar paranoid passions persist in similar circumstances, from Fiji to Brazil. Yet the two camps in Taiwan politics do not believe they are suicidal because of a Chinese military threat. Instead, blues and greens tacitly down play a China threat, finding it almost inconceivable that a CCP regime whose economy is soaring would risk China’s rise and their regime’s stability by initiating a war with America over Taiwan.
But the greens, who experience an ultimate threat to Taiwan from growing economic integration with and dependence on China, feel a need to build a strong
21 separate Taiwan identity so that an autonomous democratic Taiwan may survive.
Instead, the blues see an electoral tactic by the greens which also worsens relations with
Chinas. The blue presidential candidate in 2004 saw the green portrayal of him as
Chinese (He was born in Japanese-occupied China) as racist hatred. The attempt by former president Lee Teng-hui’s TSU to bar people not born in Taiwan from becoming president of Taiwan was similarly experienced as racist. So is the attempt to de-Sinify the school curriculum.
But to the greens, Taiwan is in a life and death struggle for survival. A small island of 23 million is ever more integrated into the rapidly rising economy of a China of
1.3 billion people. The green camp fears that Taiwan will end up like Hong Kong. It will lose its freedom and autonomy. The CCP is trying to get Taiwanese business people
(Tai shang) to sell out Taiwanese as Hong Kong tycoons earlier put their personal fortunes ahead of the political future of the Hong Kong people.
The head of Acer computers, Stan Shih, has not only had to back away from the
DPP but also to donate lavishly to China to show he cared. The “small handful” of “evil”
Tai shang, as CCP rhetoric has it, business people who supported President Chen in 2004 were denounced by the Chinese government. The CCP regime worked to get Tai shang to return to Taiwan to vote against the green camp in the presidential election. Even if blue camp representatives had not talked with the CCP about their common enemy,
President Chen, after the 2000 election (something the blues backed away from as the
2004 election neared so they should not be seen as traitors), the green camp believes that without a strong and separate Taiwan identity, an autonomous and democratic Taiwan
22 could not stand alone over the long run against a rising China which is the core of a greater Chinese mass culture and integrated economy that increasingly includes Taiwan.
Consequently, President Chen cannot back away from promoting a separable
Taiwan identity. It is a life and death issue for Taiwan, not a game of identity politics.
But no matter how politely and inclusively Chen does it, as in his conciliatory 2004 inaugural address, the dynamics of that identity quest cannot help but stir up historic cultural anxieties and political fears among the blues. Consequently, Taiwan’s polarizing paranoia will not subside as long as a threatening China continues to challenge democratic Taiwan’s very survival.
In sum, Taiwan faces tensions which make it virtually impossible for Taiwanese to act like people in a small town and hold on tight together so all can survive. Taiwan’s opportunity to pull together and to become a small town in the face of threatening storms has been squandered. Taiwan has missed chances to become a small community, windows of opportunity which seldom recur.
Yet neither blue nor green wishes Taiwan to lose its democratic autonomy. They will not, however, join together as in a small town faced by threatening storms. They do not feel immediately threatened. They see expensive arms purchases more as a concession to the American government than as a response to the Chinese government.
So as people in a metropolis, Taiwanese act day and night, night and day as strangers.
They do not cooperate against the common enemy. It does not quite seem an immediate enemy.
Some analysts believe that the blue old guard will be gone after the December
2004 legislative elections. Afterward, younger blue leaders who are more Taiwan
23 identified will come to the fore and the sources of Taiwan’s polarizing paranoia will turn out to be generational and not structural. Such a blue ticket probably would have won the presidency handily in 2004.
But the analysis I offered above is structural. It assumes that, everything else staying the same (e.g. Chinese policies and America’s regional role), identity will continue to be decisive in politics. This is increasingly the case even with younger
Taiwan-identified Hakka. The greens are then best seen as a national liberation movement producing a dominant party democracy as with the Congress Party in India and the ANC in South Africa. The consecutive dual terms of presidents Lee and Chen, heading for 16 years of presidential power, are but the start of a dominant party regime, with the KMT, the blues, facing the same dismal fate as the National Party in South
Africa. Given the contingent nature of politics, I offer this projection as a hypothesis and not a prediction. Politics is replete with contingent and unexpected forces and events.
The blues fear the green camp becoming a one-party dominant democracy. At a minimum, blues believe that democracy promises a regular alteration in the ruling party.
But given Taiwan identity politics, the blues may not return to power. They feel conned, finding they were tricked into surrendering power and then denied the possibility of returning to power. As Thomas Hobbes put it in Leviathan, “he who performeth first has no assurance that the other will perform later.” Hobbes finds that such a situation tends toward chaos, in this case, a crisis in Taiwan’s democracy. This is why it is crucial, no matter what the blues say and no matter how certain green re-election is, that the green go out of their way to make the system fair to the blues.
24 As noted at the outset, it is a commonplace, repeated here by a leading analyst in
Singapore, that “Taiwanese society is more politically polarized than ever” (Cheow).
The split was a structured consequence of political history, demographics, electoral institutions and the lateness of the legitimation of a separate Taiwan identity. Yet that identity was becoming hegemonic such that the basis of a polarized politics could be rapidly eroding. While the paranoid polarization of spring 2004 had deep roots, the future of Taiwan’s political alignment was changing rather quickly with a dominant single party system a high possibility. And it all occurred democratically.
Why not then conclude that the political competition on Taiwan so far is a marvelous testament to the vitality of its democracy? The turnout in the 2004 presidential election was over 80 percent. Isn’t it a credit to Taiwan’s democracy that, despite the threat from China, the greens do not raid the offices of blue politicians who visit China and speak to Chinese leaders who demand Taiwan’s surrender? Taiwanese enjoy a tolerant, pluralistic system debating life and death issues. Therefore, highlighting suicidal paranoia on Taiwan may miss an important point. Why not conclude that the real news from Taiwan is that demonstrators and the media of the blue camp have been totally unfettered and unafraid to say the ugliest, most unsubstantiated things about
President Chen in vile ways. Why call this suicidal? Why not celebrate it, celebrate
Taiwan's democracy?
Why not assume that were China one day to act to wound Taiwan rather than just continuing to threaten Taiwan in words, then, should that Chinese military action occur,
Taiwanese, of course, would, at that moment, join together as in a small town? But why is such unity needed now? Wouldn’t it be repressive and undemocratic?
25 Perhaps the real puzzle is that so many outsiders are perplexed by the vigorous, open, yet largely peaceful contestation of Taiwan politics. Perhaps the answer to the puzzle is that Bush’s America, bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, can be bullied by the Chinese Communist Party to put a damper on Taiwan’s democracy. Perhaps the puzzle should be, why have the so-called mature democracies grown sclerotic and ossified, while Taiwanese are showing what democracy is all about? Perhaps the so- called Taiwan problem is a creation and distortion of self-blinding outside observers who no longer recognize vibrant democracy. Perhaps the vigor of the debate among conflicting communities in Taiwan should not be characterized as peculiarly paranoid or polarizing, let alone as suicidal. Perhaps Taiwan displays what a health democracy grappling with painful transitions is all about. Perhaps the Taiwan democratic miracle was not a fraud.
In short, it may be misleading to ask, why it is that the metropolis of strangers does not become a small town that unites to confront a common enemy. Perhaps no such idyllic place as a small town ever existed. Perhaps that imagined idyll would be real hell.
Tocqueville and Mill both warned, after all, that a small community is fertile soil for a tyranny of the majority. Why celebrate unity? Even after the storm threatens, there is still much to debate about how to survive the danger. Invest in police or fire or emergency health or better building codes? Real small towns are not harmonious. They are places where people say the nastiest things about each other behind their backs. Life and politics never transcend conflict. Why believe in small town fantasies? Why not celebrate Taiwan, a glorious democracy, a nation which can openly debate life and death issues even in the most difficult of times, as a democratic metropolis.
26 SOURCES
Chao Chien-min, “A Test for Taiwan’s Democracy,” Topics, April 2004, pp. 38-41.
Cheow, Eric Teo Chu, “Give Taiwan international cultural space.”
Gertz, Bill, “Is this a Cheney gift to China? U.S. official resigns over differences on Taiwan,” Washington Times, April 7, 2004.
Hille, Kathrin, “Taiwan radicals urge violent protests,” Financial Times, March 26, 2004.
Hsueh Chao-yung, “National Identity and Conflicting Loyalty and Obedience in the ROC armed forces,” Issues and Studies, 39.4 (December 2003), pp. 145-162.
Lague, David, “The Result is Final: A Divided Taiwan,” Far Eastern Economic Review, April 1, 2004, pp. 14-17.
Lilley, James, China hands, N.Y., Public Affairs, 2004.
Lin Jih-wen, “A Blue Tango,” Issues and Studies, 39.2 (June 2003), pp. 41-72.
“Taiwan Election Results,” National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, March 22, 2004.
Waldron, Arthur, “Don’t Let Taiwan Down,” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 13, 2004, p. 27.
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