Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) recent victory was clearly a nightmare scenario for Beijing. Despite his repeated claims of wanting to improve relations with Beijing, he was the only major candidate who was not formally committed to Taiwan's eventual unification with the mainland. Chen, along with the people of Taiwan and interested observers around the world, are now waiting to see how Beijing will respond to this turn of events. Much ink has been spilled already about the implications of Chen's administration for cross-strait relations.
The lessons of Taiwan's democratization for China's political system, and for the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party, has not received nearly as much attention. But the prospects for further political reform in China, whether in the short or long term, have important implications for Taiwan's relationship with China. Chen's victory holds lessons both for China's leaders and for Chinese society in general.
For the leadership, the first lesson concerns the uncertainty of elections. Although China has been experimenting with village level elections for over a decade, party leaders have been reluctant to extend these elections to higher levels, such as townships and counties. In recent years, there have been a few, and very quiet, experiments in some urban areas. The main obstacle to expanding elections is the fear that the wrong people will win the election. The CCP seems uncomfortable with political processes where it cannot control the outcome. Chen's victory in Taiwan is the most recent and from the CCP's perspective, most vivid reminder that truly democratic elections are inherently uncertain. For advocates of political reform and democratization in the CCP, their job of convincing skeptics in the CCP that elections will not sweep them out of power has just gotten much harder.
The second lesson for China's leaders concerns the KMT's historic loss of power after governing Taiwan for over 50 years. During that time, it developed a record of economic and political development that has rightly been called the "Taiwan miracle." The KMT's success at implementing growth-oriented policies while improving the level of economic equality challenges the conventional wisdom that rapid growth and equity are not compatible goals for developing countries. After a prolonged period of often brutal rule, it helped usher in the democratization of Taiwan's political system. It enlarged the scope of political opportunities for Taiwanese, first within the KMT and later across the entire government and military. The lesson for CCP leaders must be chilling: This remarkable record of economic and political development was still not enough to keep the KMT in power. The CCP has been basing its legitimacy on its ability to achieve high rates of growth and improved standards of living.
The fate of the KMT shows how hollow this strategy is. Taiwan has achieved levels of economic prosperity and democracy that are still decades away in China, and yet the KMT experienced a steady decay in the level of popular support, as measured by its share of the vote in elections over the past 20 or more years. Taiwan's democratization shows that the legitimacy of a ruling party cannot rest on economic growth alone.
The third lesson concerns why Lien Chan (連戰) lost and Chen Shui-bian won: democratization by itself does not cure corruption, but it can make it more visible and easier to address. Political corruption in the election process clearly increased over the past decade. Vote buying became more common and more costly. With increased competition from the DPP, the KMT had to give more financial benefits to local factions to keep their support and encourage their cooperation in mobilizing votes. The KMT was trapped in a dilemma: It needed the support of local factions to win elections, but the leaders of these factions were often notorious for links with organized crime and their own corruption. KMT members who ran without the party's endorsement had to raise huge sums of money on their own to run their campaigns. Public revulsion toward "black gold" was one of the keys to Chen's victory. Democratization in Taiwan gave rise to a new form of corruption and cleaning it up will be at the top of Chen's domestic policy agenda. But it has also tarnished the image of Taiwan's democracy by highlighting the close connection between elected officials and organized crime. China is already plagued with rampant corruption concerning its economy; the realization that democracy may compound its problems with a new type of corruption must be disconcerting to advocates of democratization within China.
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