Introduction
Part 1. Northeast Asia and China’s External Relations
2. Since 2008
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that Chen sought an independent Taiwan when in fact he hoped to find a way to coexist with China. To keep his party in power in 2004 and 2008, he shifted, aligning with his party’s pro-independence base―playing up identity politics, baiting China, and proposing provocative initiatives. China’s reactions deepened Taiwan’s sense of vulnerability. It was a situation of mutual fear.
Taiwan’s actions and China’s response also alarmed the U.S.
It feared that a negative cross-Strait spiral might lead to a conflict in which it would have to intervene. So the Clinton Administration and the second Bush Administration pursued an approach of “dual deterrence”: simultaneously warning Beijing and Taipei against provocative actions and reassuring each of U.S. intentions.
dignity by engaging China, not provoking it. On election day, he got 58% of the vote.
Ma Ying-jeou moved quickly to carry out his campaign proposals. He first reassured Beijing about his intentions while president by pledging there would be no move to independence during his presidency. He accepted the so-called “1992 Consensus,”
a formula that the two sides had worked out for the April 1993 meeting noted above.54 The two sides agreed that they would focus first on “easy task,” mainly economic issues before moving to harder ones in the political and security arenas. Between 2008 and 2011, they rapidly concluded a series of agreements, mostly economic in nature, to remove the obstacles between them and to expand areas of mutual cooperation. The initial accords removed obstacles to normal interactions between the two sides.
More ambitious was crafting a process of economic liberalization, the centerpiece of which was the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement(ECFA), signed in June 2010. ECFA’s ultimate objective was the creation of a free trade area between the Taiwan Strait.
Nothing in this process was easy. Each successive negotiation became more difficult than the one before because the issues were more difficult and affected more domestic interests. In the summer of 2009, Beijing got impatient about moving from
54_To reassure the Taiwan public, he also called for no unification and no war.
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economic issues to political ones and only backed off when Taipei signaled that the political climate was not right. On the one hand, Ma Ying-jeou had low approval ratings because of some mistakes by his administration. On the other, the opposition DPP emphasized the downside of the Mainland engagement. It charged that the benefits were going only to the wealthy while average citizens suffered. It also asserted that Ma Ying-jeou had started Taiwan down the slippery slope towards unification, selling out Taiwan’s sovereignty in the process.
This view, while understandable, was not accurate. Although Ma probably shares his party’s long-term goal of “ultimate unification,” he also believes that the terms and conditions must be right and that a broad majority of the Taiwan public believes that the terms are right. A reason for that caution is that unification, whatever the terms, probably will require amendments to the ROC constitution. That in turn requires a three-fourths vote in the legislature and approval in a public referendum by fifty percent of all registered voters―a very high bar. When, during Ma’s presidency, there were even hints of movement toward unification, there was a strong negative public reaction.
So the goal of Ma’s mainland policy was to stabilize Beijing- Taipei relations after a long period of turmoil rather than trying to resolve the fundamental dispute between the two sides.
Stabilization might lead to resolution, of course, but only if Taiwan chose to go there.
In the 2012 presidential campaign, the DPP again pushed its anti-Ma and anti-ECFA arguments, warning that Taiwan was on a slippery slope. Ma argued that his policies had brought an improvement in economic performance and that a DPP victory would put those benefits at risk. Ma got the better of the argument and won re-election by a safe margin. Still, Taiwan remains a deeply divided polity.
Just as cross-Strait relations improved under Ma Ying-jeou, so did the U.S.-Taiwan ties. Washington both approved of the results of Ma’s policies and improved bilateral ties. The conduct of relations improved considerably. The Obama Administration approved both visa-waiver treatment for Taiwan visitors to America and $13 billion in arms sales, a record for one, four-year term. After a couple of false starts, the Ma Administration removed obstacles to discussions of bilateral economic liberalization. This reflected a linkage in American policy: the U.S. relations with Taiwan are a function of Taiwan’s policies towards China.
During Ma’s second term, even cross-Strait stabilization became hard. One reason was on display in the negotiations with Beijing concerning Ma’s sensible but modest initiative to allow each side’s semi-official cross-Strait organizations55 to open branch offices in the other’s capital city. The talks got hung up on the question of whether officers in the SEF’s office
55_Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation(SEF) and the Mainland’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait.
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on the mainland could visit Taiwan residents who had been detained by the mainland law-enforcement authorities. Taipei insisted that it had to be able to help its citizens in trouble.
Beijing objected because this service looked a lot like the consular function that embassies perform, thus suggesting that Taiwan was a sovereign entity. Deep differences on that question have been the key obstacle to resolving the basic cross-Strait dispute, but they also intrude into the stabilization effort.
A second reason for the slow-down in cross-Strait stabilization was domestic politics on Taiwan. Even in the economic sphere, easy issues were destined to become hard. For example, the Service Trade Agreement, which was signed in June 2013, would open parts of the Taiwan market to mainland service providers, thus threatening their Taiwan competitors. At the same time, some Taiwan service sectors doubted that they would be able to take advantage of the market openings on the mainland side.56 To make matters worse for the Ma Administration, which probably could have done a better job selling the agreement to the public, the DPP chose to fight the agreement in the Legislature rather than allow it to go through.57 The DPP, knowing that it could not defeat the agreement if it came to a vote in the
56_This was particularly a concern of small and medium enterprises.
57_This approach was different from the one the DPP eventually adopted regarding the initial ECFA pact in 2010. The party initially said that it would revisit that agreement if it returned to power in 2012. Once it saw how
Legislative Yuan, chose to block its consideration at every turn.
When in mid-March 2014, the KMT caucus grew frustrated and tried to abandon article-by-article review and move directly for a vote on the agreement, the DPP legislators seized control of the legislature. They were soon joined by students from various Taiwan universities who called themselves the “Sun flower Movement.” After several weeks, the Legislative Yuan returned to something like normal but passage of the agreement was even less likely than when the crisis began.
The Service Trade Agreement was only the most recent battle in a long war. That was a general conflict over how to cope with an increasingly powerful China, which has been the central issue of Taiwan politics for two decades. It is a debate that has evoked rival policy approaches(the proper mix of engagement and resistance) and contending definitions of national identity (Chinese? Taiwanese? Some sort of mixture?).
The Sunflower Movement was one example of a new phenomenon in Taiwan politics: the emergence of new, activist social movements that are intensely dedicated to a specific cause and use social media to mobilize followers. These movements lack confidence in the vision of Taiwan’s political leaders and in the effectiveness of the island’s political institutions to provide effective and accountable governance. The mass media provides these movements with disproportionate coverage. This phenomenon is not totally new, of course. There were social movements on
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the island in the 1980s and early 1990s. Thereafter, political parties and elections channeled public sentiment. Towards the new movements, parties have an ambivalent perspective. The Kuomintang appears not to know how to cope with them. The DPP has tried to co-opt them for its own purposes. Indeed, the Sunflower occupation of the Legislative Yuan would not have happened without the DPP’s enabling actions.