The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will come to power in January and it is expected to be the first time that there has been a transfer of power in the legislature from the pan-blue camp. The DPP is likely to gain half of the seats on its own.
The central government and the legislative majority will be overturned. Over the years, many people have dreamed of this and are looking forward to the day when Taiwan will get rid of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
The slogan goes: Unless the KMT falls, Taiwan will never be good at all, but we need to seriously consider what Taiwan should do to get better after the fall of the KMT.
When talking about the party’s fall, most people refer to its fall from its position of power without making a more detailed analysis of what the KMT represents in terms of social structure and foundation.
The local factions that the KMT relied on in the past, together with the central party-state elite and the politically and commercially powerful conglomerates that have developed over the past 10 years or so, have taken control of Taiwan’s political and economic systems, and through the KMT gained control over the central executive power and the legislative majority.
Through patronage, these groups have consolidated their power and economic interests. Of course, thanks to some results from democratization and judicial reform, the KMT’s control of local factions and their organization and mobilization may have been weakened somewhat. The KMT’s fierce internal power struggles have made the conflicts between local factions and the party-state elite even more severe.
However, while this has been going on, there is a group of people who have quietly turned to the DPP without loudly announcing their stance. At the end of last year, during the nine-in-one elections, the KMT was overwhelmed by a new variable: Many of the polls did not take into account young voters, who became a decisive force. Not only did they significantly expand the number of cities and counties governed by the DPP, some of the third-force political parties, such as the Green Party, also won a few city and county councilor seats, thus changing the local political landscape.
Has the foundation for the KMT’s rule and its supporting social structure already changed? It cannot be said with any certainty, but the fact is that this force is not so easily weakened.
How the KMT’s past social and economic support, whether from local factions or from cross-strait political and business consortia, will be made to collapse and prevented from quickly finding another host is the key question that should be asked. It should not be so easily believed that after the DPP comes to power after next year’s elections, local factional political and economic interests will be immediately eliminated. Will powerful cross-strait consortia just give up their interests? If so, where will they go, and how will the DPP deal with and confront them?
In the past, the DPP, a highly heterogeneous party made up of many diverse components, cooperated with local factions and of course consolidated its own system. It naturally had its own representatives and support system to allow it to mediate and coordinate relations between government and business. Embarrassingly, in the DPP, the performance of these people or forces were mixed, sometimes playing a key role, sometimes removing or blocking many important reform items on the agenda and sheltering many vested interests, with the result that many people are unable to decide whether to support or abandon them.
With the aim of giving the DPP an absolute legislative majority and overthrowing the KMT, the public often forgets what is essential: the need to dismantle the structures of self-interest and power. Can we really be content with just repeating the slogans “get rid of the KMT” or “unless the KMT falls, Taiwan will never be good at all?”
Can we happily believe that a transfer of power and a pan-green camp legislative majority will necessarily bring a brighter and better future? Rather than repeating these slogans, we should ask two questions: First, in a future with a new ruling party and legislative majority, who may take over the structures and benefits that we dislike and have vowed to overthrow? Second, how, within civil society, are we going to construct a new system a new political logic strong enough to counterbalance these old structures, interests and politics? These two questions need to be put not only to the DPP, but also to the parties in the third force and to ourselves as Taiwanese.
Lin Fei-fan is a founding member of Taiwan March.
Translated by Clare Lear
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past