Andrew writes, "[T]he 2000 election of Chen Shuibian as president of the country that he likes to call "Taiwan" was a stunning event -- the first democratically engineered change of power in a culturally Chinese society."

That's a powerful sentence, Andrew. It took a couple of readings before it really sank in.

As a result of your last Taiwan-China post, I learned that the KMT still controls the Taiwan legislature. So I'm not surprised to read of gridlock and chaos [see: U.S. Senate; filibuster] despite the election of Chen Shui-Bian; and I suppose this explains the occasional brawls shown on CNN. But dammit, Janet, they're trying; and thanks to 'How the World Works' I've become interested in -- and frankly am rooting for -- Taiwan. I hope its efforts today will one day lead the PRC to a form of democracy (with Chinese characteristics of course).

That's the phrase used in The Economist to describe Taiwan's democracy, and it's one I would agree with. I can't refute an expert long-term observer on the subject, other than to note that there are two kinds of people in the world, optimists and pessimists. But from my visits there and from talking to family who live there (and have for several generations), I understand that the main tension in the political system is the degree of "reunification" with the Mainland. The Taiwanese generally see it as inevitable that they will be part of China some day. But the devil is in the details. Chen's party favors independence, which threatens to bring down the Beijing hammer on the tiny island, while Chiang's former party, ironically, more or less wants to be part of China proper (ironic, because until at least the late 1970s school kids in Taiwan were taught by Chiang that they were one day going to "retake the Mainland" and now his party advocates the reverse). And even though the scenes from the legislature that play on television sometimes feature actual fisticuffs -- how's THAT for messy democracy --I wouldn't expect that the Beijing government, much less the Mainland proles, are much swayed one way or the other by the inefficiency of Taiwan's participatory democracy. The fact that Taiwan emerged from a very repressive authoritarian rule (Mao had nothing on Chiang when it came to ruthlessness) with a minimum of violence and within a decade went to regular, open elections, with full-throated dissent allowed, is something of a miracle. That is the threat that Beijing must fear, and that awful totalitarian government can only hope that Taipei does things poorly enough to look ridiculous. Like bitch-slapping each other during legislative debates.

WeiKuBoy, I just wanted to note that those brawls you mentioned are usually pre-meditated media spectacles to gain attention for certain bill's or projects.

See here:

http://onlyredheadintaiwan.blogspot.com/2007/05/would-gentlemen-from-tainan-please-stop.html

It's got to be one of the strangest political media stunts I've ever heard of.

But, I'm young. I'm sure there are worse. Hell, for Taiwan's sake, I hope there's worse.

An excerpt from my blogpost on this:

......Note that Chu does not clearly identify either political stances toward democracy, or the political allegiance of the KMT and its allies to China. By treating identity itself as having no important relationship to the democracy issue, Chu assigns equivalence to the KMT and the DPP in their respective political behavior. But of course, it is central to understanding democracy on the island that one party supports it while the other does not. Political identity is intimately related to party stance on democracy....part of the struggle over identity is the struggle over democracy.

Further, Chu's analysis of the problems between Chen and the KMT is incorrect: recall motions against Chen date back to when he was mayor of Taipei, and the KMT attempted to recall him for shutting down the KMT-connected lucrative brothel businesses within the city of Taipei. After Ma became mayor, those businesses quietly re-opened. Recall is a tactic the KMT deploys in paralyzing the government here. It was not an angry response to Chen's high-handedness, but a tactic the KMT was waiting for a chance to deploy, diddling the negotiations so that its own man, Premier Tang Fei, was betrayed and defeated, and then pretending to be upset when the President did what the DPP had been promising to do for years. That was nicely handled by the KMT's media machine. It is useful to see how the KMT used and tossed Tang Fei in the light of how they recently booted KMT Defense Minister Lee Jye from the party for serving in the DPP government. To argue that the DPP is somehow responsible for the malaise in Taiwan is to implicitly argue that KMT acted in good faith in building Taiwan's democracy. That was simply never the case. Chu's analysis seriously misrepresents the situation here.

Leonard correctly recognizes that part of the problems of political order in Taiwan is that people really don't accept the rough and tumble of democracy as part of norm of political behavior.

Or is it just demonstrating the reality of the democratic process, which is inherently messy and chaotic, and by no means inevitably leads to perfect government?

One constantly hears complaints that Taiwan is in some kind of anarchy, although the mail arrives every day on time -- including some deliveries on Sunday, the traffic flows, the factories tick on, and the people go about their daily business. Taiwan may be lawless but it is not anarchic. At bottom, I think, much of the negative thinking about democracy is actually Chinese socialization to think of order as sameness. In Chinese political thought, difference equals disorder. It is inevitable that democracy in Taiwan would produce noisy political conflict -- like it does everywhere else. Perhaps academics like Chu should make that clear to their western and local audiences. What we have is a robust democratic society waiting to reach full bloom -- as soon as the anti-democratic, pro-China parties are defeated.

Anthropologist Nick Pazderic has noted that in Chinese thinking that which is weeded out, or left behind, is a source of disorder and chaos. In the west, people view education as an enhancement process, but in Chinese culture, it is a weeding out process. Hence, as China's power swells, Taiwanese experience, not a growing China, but a shrinking Taiwan, being somehow weeded out. In social situations in Taiwanese society, in many cases social change is held to be a zero sum game -- if one person is rising, others must be falling. This is made worse because Taiwan sees China as a rival, not merely another country across the water from it, like the Philippines or Japan. Thus, China's rise implies Taiwan's fall from almost any angle a Taiwanese looks at it. These attitudes occasionally creep into the foreign media as well.

Is Taiwan in a mess? Sure.Is this normal? Sure. Academics like Chu need to stop feeding negative attitudes about democracy here and abroad, and work instead to educate the public that messy infighting is normal in robust democracies, and to change the public's view of the role of diversity in a free nation. Chu should also take note: dissidents in China and Singapore have publicly stated that they draw inspiration from Taiwan. Just last week a prominent Singaporean democracy supporter publicly chastised Ma Ying-jeou for his approving stance on authoritarianism in Singapore, observing:

I am sure that the people of Taiwan cherish their hard-won political freedom and are proud to live in a democratic society, a society that they contribute towards and continue to shape. In fact, in many ways democracy advocates in Singapore draw inspiration from Taiwan in its transformation from martial law to a bona fide democracy.

If Taiwan's messy democracy is a failure, then the news has failed to reach those Chinese societies that Chu alleges would be most put off by it.

++++

Now, I agree that we sure could use some improvement here (like some idea of a civil society, for example) but on whole Taiwan continues to lurch in the right direction. It's really shame that the US has abdicated its moral position in the world, or we'd be getting more of an impetus here. One problem we face is that lack of the outside push....I feel a blogpost coming on.

Michael