It is usually foolish to predict politics in the coming year for any place at any time. Its very easy to get caught out by Taiwan — who predicted the Sunflower movement a year in advance?
Its especially unwise right now given the equilibrium-puncturing effects of international forces stemming from a decline in both the economic and the political efficiency of democracy. Yet attempting any national predictions without direct acknowledgment of the likely impact of external elements would be downright implausible. So, given the goodwill that goes with the Lunar New Year, here goes:
Almost certainly dominant will be the continuation of US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the established interventionist patterns internationally as well-illustrated by the Syrian withdrawal; abandoning NATO, leaving funding to Europe itself; refusal of the Paris climate accord; urging that Japan might take over more responsibility for erstwhile US military burdens in the Pacific; the neurosis over the Mexican border wall; and the continued pressure to both protectionism and a commercial war with the only really large economy that is maintaining fast economic growth.
This seeming inchoate multilevel withdrawal is appealing to Americans who feel denied and neglected at home while so much is spent abroad, and there is now every likelihood that Trump secures a second term. During this year, this sets the scene for the international elements that might affect Taiwan in different ways.
Uncertainty will be compounded by the continued emergence of post-diplomacy throughout the democratic world.
The horrible mix of nuclear threat, low diplomacy, rapid escalation by reactive leaders, and rampant high-tech was exemplified by North Korea and the US last year and this type of risky political action by leaders who are not statespeople means that as a hot-spot speedily emerges, the power of diplomacy is gone.
This year, this will combine with even more insidious high-tech Internet and social media activity, penetrating even the most delicate negotiating situations, so that any remnants of diplomacy must take place in institutional bunkers, as professional negotiators hunker down to try to make sense of their own as well as other political masters.
In its delicate and confusing political situation, where notions of accord, balance and arbitrage might be twittered away on the finger tips of a belligerent US president, political discussion in Taiwan must address such elements without being overrun by them.
A perfectly reasonable tactic for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) would be to make some real effort to convert the China threat into a more positive relationship and to do so openly to gain yet more breathing space during a year in which US support for Taiwan could well be bartered for concessions in the present and coming US-China trade wars.
A pragmatic step would be for Taiwan to take more advantage of Chinese economic restructuring, of much greater relevance than China’s overall rate of growth.
The details in the Chinese Five Year Plan, served as forecasts of recent trends. During 2017 and last year, China’s direct foreign investment, designed mostly to gather both influence and technical information and expertise in the US, Europe and Africa, enjoyed rapid growth, and investment in Belt and Road countries saw growth of 30 percent.
The new technology strategy could be of enormous benefit to Taiwan, especially in the employment of graduates skilled in business, foreign languages, mathematics, information technologies, environmental industries and marine and biotechnical innovations. That is, present tendencies in China are likely to increase Taiwan-China techno-complementarity.
They lead the way to a 2019 broadening out from President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) New Southbound Policy and a closer commercial networking between East and South Asia (especially Indonesia, India, Singapore and Malaysia) as an alternative to a global perspective that has fallen fowl of low growth, protectionism, weakening of democracies and challenge to free markets, anarchic elements in traditional major commercial systems (from France to Russia), and continued low performances of growth and welfare in most of Africa and South America.
Whatever the political noise, the main destinations of Taiwan’s exports in order of importance are China, Hong Kong, the US and Japan; similarly, Taiwan’s imports come from China, Japan, the US and South Korea (2018). Contrasting political economies coalesce in a flow of basic goods primarily spanning machinery and electrical equipment, metals, plastics and chemicals.
There is no obvious reason to reject this perspective — apart from confused claims as to what voters think of their “Chinese” versus their “Taiwanese” identities, and doubts as to whether closer and mutually beneficial commercial relations are of greater or lesser advantage to Taiwan’s maintenance of the “status quo.”
However, conversion of Tsai’s southbound policy to an “East and South Asian” focus, at least commercially and industrially, seems both the safer bet and one that is most likely to deliver greater employment and growth.
Whether during this year Taiwan would convert such gain to greater welfare, medical and environmental spending within Taiwan remains doubtful.
The point is that Taiwan can only emerge as proactive in any of this international context from a firm internal political base.
Many see the recent DPP debacle as primarily a result of its failure to fully define and address the major problems faced by citizens — falling growth, productivity and employment leading to higher unemployment, depression in business prospects and innovation, lack of expenditure on major social problems of unemployment, city degeneration, failing infrastructure and a sense of elite political battles being fought at a level that seldom touches real life.
On the other hand, much of the blame for last year’s elections result might be due to the DPP’s failure in international relations, especially the looming threat of China, so recently re-expressed by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
A world of Trumpian post-diplomacy, which is seemingly on the threshold of a retreat from democracy, is no place for a Taiwan that continues to prevaricate.
Networking toward a more innovative international focus that does not exclude China, but rather helps to delineate a new China, pushing new commercial and technological alliances, using Taiwan’s democracy as a lesson in maintaining the essentials of democracy in emerging economies and polities, might be pursued as a complementary external policy strategy to one of social and economic renewal within Taiwan.
So, as was suggested at the outset, the one thing that I might predict about this year is that the political world will become even more confusing and inchoate.
If the DPP does not come to grips with the blend of external changes and internal economic and political pressures, then the political system will get bogged down in internal reforms that take little account of the international economic and political environs, or politicians will continue pro and anti-China rhetoric while neglecting unemployment and a deteriorating social life.
However, if Taiwan indeed does engage with both external and internal environs, then this year could be very stormy indeed.
In Taiwan a year of broad innovation would hardly allow the formulation, never mind the completion, of any of the required policies, so a burst of novelty might quickly be swallowed by a bout of retreat.
This is not much of a conclusion. However, within this complexity it might be possible to square the circle of internal and external demands, through the reformulation of another of Tsai’s earlier suggestions.
In early 2012 she suggested — as a way to strenghten the institutional basis of Taiwan’s democracy — the notion of a “consociational democratic system” for Taiwan, an idea for interparty power sharing, whereby segmented but democratic societies could sustain progressive democracy through power diffusion beyond that of merely sharing Cabinet appointments between two political parties in an effectively dualistic party system.
In Taiwan this is a little complicated with the so-called “Han wave” and the more general rise of minority parties, but it should not yet be placed beyond the bounds of the politically possible.
The reason this might loom larger for Taiwan this year as a form of squaring the circle is that present episodes in democracies elsewhere are showing a redundancy of two-party politics, especially if they are seen as primarily representing existing powerful administrative and cultural establishments.
So, the rise of Trump in the US and an associated collapse of diplomacy; the terrible situation of British Prime Minister Theresa May and the Tories in the crisis of Brexit and the European status of the UK; the abnormality of what happened last year in France, and so on.
Writing in the Taipei Times in 2012, I was fully behind the possible salience of this idea for Taiwan.
Right now, the confused result of last year’s elections and the international tendencies in democracies more generally, combine to shore up support for some radical attack on the tired parry and thrust of the two-party system in Taiwan.
It is not clear what a presidential election today would bring, but it does seem that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is strengthening its hand (the KMT’s comments on China’s recent Taiwan statements confuse the issue further), that civil society’s awareness of the difficult international status of Taiwan runs very high, and that the youthful vote in particular might appreciate a system that was addressing both internal and external political issues on more radical yet consensual, “consociational” grounds.
On this thesis Tsai should begin the new year with renovation, with a call for immediate cross-party discussions on major internal policy issues, promising the eventual possibility of a form of “consociational” responsibility emerging in properly institutional terms during this year as groundwork for maintaining such a system into and beyond the next elections.
Ian Inkster is a professorial research associate at the Center of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London; a senior fellow at the Taiwan Studies Program, China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham; and the editor of the international journal History of Technology.
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