Last month, the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation released a poll showing that 75.2 percent of respondents considered themselves Taiwanese, rather than Chinese. However, support for Taiwan independence declined significantly to 38.3 percent from 51.2 percent in 2016, with about 2 million people changing their views.
This could be related to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government’s poor performance. However, it also highlights the tough challenges that pro-independence forces are facing, especially in view of the prevailing legislative electoral system and the DPP’s primary system.
The first is a result of the 2005 constitutional amendments, during which the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the DPP agreed to adopt a single-member district, two-vote system, which is unfavorable to smaller parties.
Since only one legislator is elected in each district, it is basically a showdown between the two big parties, effectively marginalizing smaller parties. As for legislators-at-large, aside from the imbalance in the number of legislative seats allocated to district constituencies, parties receiving less than 5 percent of the total electoral vote are deprived of such seats. Since votes carry different weight depending on where you live, smaller parties’ chances of gaining a legislative seat is very limited.
Unfortunately, pro-independence parties are among the small parties that suffer because of this sytem. For example, in the 2004 elections, Taiwan Solidarity Union won 12 district and legislator-at-large seats. However, after the amendments were passed, the party won only three legislator-at-large seats in 2012, and none in 2008 and 2016. Furthermore, in 2016, the New Power Party (NPP), riding the wave of the 2014 Sunflower movement, won just two district legislator seats — and it needed the DPP’s help to do so.
The second difficulty is the DPP’s primary opinion poll system. As the votes of many nominal members were controlled by vested interests in the past, the party changed its primary opinion from members-only to include the general public to better evaluate potential candidates.
Setting aside the question of whether the DPP is implementing an authoritarian system as an excuse for winning elections to make sure that members who are strongly pro-independence will not become the party chairperson or a member of the party leadership, the all-inclusive primary poll system basically ignores members’ opinions and ideology, contravening basic party principles and turning the party into an interest group that only cares about political gains and winning elections.
The opinion poll primary system has been criticized for lacking credibility, but the biggest problem is that it does not prevent supporters of rival parties from distorting the results by supporting weaker candidates and then attacking them during the official election campaign. If a rival party cannot win an election, its supporters tend to support DPP candidates whose views are closer to their own.
Based on the results of the DPP’s recent primary polls, it is easy to see that aspirants with a strong pro-independence profile cannot compete with those who are closer to the pan-blue camp.
Some candidates even use the pan-blue media to increase their exposure, so that these outlets and pan-blue supporters can sway and perhaps even decide the DPP’s nomination, effectively blocking the party’s pro-independence forces.
Ironically, if it were not for China’s constant repression of Taiwan’s independence forces, the number of independence supporters might have fallen even further.
Lau Yi-te is chairman of the Taiwan Solidarity Union.
Translated by Eddy Chang
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS