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
For Xi Jinping (習近平) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the military conquest of Taiwan is an absolute requirement for the CCP’s much more fantastic ambition: control over our solar system. Controlling Taiwan will allow the CCP to dominate the First Island Chain and to better neutralize the Philippines, decreasing the threat to the most important People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Strategic Support Force (SSF) space base, the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island. Satellite and manned space launches from the Jiuquan and Xichang Satellite Launch Centers regularly pass close to Taiwan, which is also a very serious threat to the PLA,
Taiwan is beautiful — no doubt about it. In Taipei, the streets are clean, the skyline is gorgeous and the subway is world-class. The coastline is easily accessible and mountains can be seen in the distance. The people are hardworking, successful and busy. Every luxury known to humankind is available and people live on their smartphones. As an American visiting for the first time, here are some things I learned about the country. First, people from Taiwan and America love freedom and democracy and have for many years. When we defeated Japan in 1945, Taiwan was freed from Japanese rule. In
More than 100 Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) vessels and aircraft were detected making incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) on Sunday and Monday, the Ministry of National Defense reported on Monday. The ministry responded to the incursions by calling on China to “immediately stop such destructive unilateral actions,” saying that Beijing’s actions could “easily lead to a sharp escalation in tensions and worsen regional security.” Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲), a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said that the unusually high number of incursions over such a short time was likely Beijing’s response to efforts
Taiwan’s first indigenous defense submarine prototype, the Hai Kun (SS-711), is to be launched tomorrow and undergo underwater testing next month. It is a major breakthrough in upgrading the nation’s self-defense capabilities, and would make it more difficult for China to blockade Taiwan. Facing Beijing’s escalating military threats and ambitions of expanding across the Taiwan Strait, a domestically developed submarine was first proposed in the 1990s under then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝). The Indigenous Defense Submarine (IDS) program was formally initiated in 2016, as President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office, with the aim of creating a fleet of eight domestically developed submarines. The
RSS