Tomorrow is Election Day in Taiwan, and once again, I am rooting for the Democratic Progressive Party.
Yes, you read that right, so it requires an explanation.
Taiwan has seen dramatic political changes since the Kuomintang (a.k.a. Nationalist) regime of Chiang Kai-Shek came under the control of Lee Teng-Hui. Prior to Lee taking power, the KMT – as its known – focused more on the pipe-dream of winning back the Chinese mainland than anything else. Lee shifted gears and focused on improving the lives of Taiwanese. he democratized the islands within a decade of taking power, and won himself an elected four-year term in 1996. Once he left in 2000, however, the old guard in the KMT took over the party – and this time, reunification was bereft of the question of who should be in charge. Thus, in great irony (and sadness), the decades-long enemy of the Chinese Communist Party became its closest friend on Taiwan. Lee himself left the KMT and founded the robustly anti-Communist Taiwan Solidarity Union.
Meanwhile, dissidents within Taiwan had been pushing for human rights and political freedom long before Lee began earning the moniker given to him as he left office (“Mr. Democracy”). Among the taboo positions embraced by the dissidents was outright independence for Taiwan (which still calls itself the Republic of China). The oldest dissident political party – the Democratic Progressive, or DPP – began to soft-pedal de jure independence, but they made it clear the KMT’s acceptance of reunification under Zhongnanhai leadership was a non-starter. It was enough for the DPP to break through in 2000, and elect the first DPP president: Chen Shui-bian.
Chen was dramatically re-elected in 2004, but his popularity waned as he became seen to be increasingly corrupt. The KMT, meanwhile, seemed to have found the light with Ma Ying-jeou, a Taipei Mayor who repeatedly insisted reunification wasn’t happening without democracy coming to the mainland. Ma easily won in 2008, and despite a coziness with Beijing that worried many Taiwanese, he was narrowly re-elected in 2012.
Sadly, during his second term, Ma seems to have moved far closer to the KMT old guard then they did to him – to the point of a bizarre, internecine plot to remove the speaker of Taiwan’s parliament – a member of Ma’s own party – for being insufficiently supportive of Ma’s lean to the CCP.
Lee’s TSU has endorsed the DPP’s presidential nominee: Tsai Ing-wen, and the DPP is once again the leading anti-Communist voice in Taiwan. While Tsai is favored to win, the party could also score the first legislative majority for itself and its allies (known as the “pan-green” coalition) in history. It would be a stinging rebuke to the CCP and its enablers on the island democracy.
I, for one, am hoping that’s the result we see from Taiwan tomorrow.
