The historic landslide win by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in the presidential election was truly impressive, lining DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) up to be the nation’s first female president and the first female head of state in any Chinese polity in modern times.
Several valuable insights can be discerned from this democratic exercise.
First, the wind of democratization has led the nation to remarkable success and progress, not to disaster.
Taiwan, once again, proved itself to be a mature and sophisticated democracy in the early 21st century as this is the third smooth presidential transition.
The nation has gone through peaceful power transitions twice, in 2000 and in 2008.
For Taiwan, to exercise its own democratic governance, which transcends national, ethnic, local and kinship groupings, is a sensible way to proclaim and embrace universal values and norms.
Second, the democratic exercise appears to have made the electorate more close-knit, making people aware of their common fate in an increasingly globalized world.
People from all walks of life went to the polls to assert the right of self-determination in defiance of Chinese pressure.
This development has fostered a sensible approach toward the discourse of identity.
Identity is a thorny concept, because it is not easy to clarify. Often, the idea of a singular identity — national, ethnic, religious, economic or cultural — provokes fiery passions, heated debates and violet acts.
However, the story of Taiwanese democratization reminds people that identity, both global and local, should be the sum of existing allegiances. Identity is what makes people unique, and Taiwanese voters showed that their cosmopolitan identity is truly compatible with democratic values in an open and pluralistic world.
Third, managing diversity is a modern enterprise. Nowadays it is impossible for any government to demand and impose mandatory uniformity over a diverse and educated population.
How Beijing will react to the heavy defeat of the pro-China Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the electoral victory of the DPP is yet to be seen.
What is likely to concern the public most is that a mighty Chinese nation-state perceives itself to be frightened by any democratic change in its peripheries and chooses to seek refuge in the values, symbols and rhetoric of an age-old nationalistic ideology.
It is nothing more than an impulsive, irrational and regressive response to the rise of democratic localism in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
Such a reaction only highlights a dialectical problem in Chinese politics: the modernizing state is still searching for a synthesis between the longing for a unifying identity and the desire for embracing universality.
Unless China gets to grips with Taiwan’s slow, but steady, journey toward democracy, it will be immensely difficult to strike a balance between the endogenous and gravitational forces of change.
Joseph Tse-hei Lee is a professor of history and co-director of the bachelor’s degree program in Global Asia Studies at Pace University in New York City.
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