Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020. xii, 420 pp. (Tables, figures, graphs.) US$32.50, paper. ISBN 978-1-6237-911-4.
In the fast-paced world, shadowed by the pandemic and increasing tension between countries, the period from 2008 to 2016 felt like a distant memory. Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Years, edited by Kharis Templeman, Yun-han Chu, and Larry Diamond, comprehensively concludes Ma’s presidency with focus on political institutions, democracy, civil society, and cross-strait relations. The collection of essays shows how resilient and dynamic Taiwan’s democracy was during those eight years. The same team previously edited a volume on Ma’s predecessor Chen Shui-bian’s government (Taiwan’s Democracy Challenged: The Chen Shui-bian Years, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016), in which they adopted a more dubious stance on Taiwan’s democracy.
This volume greatly contributes to both Taiwan Studies and the wider scope of comparative politics in two senses. First, it reiterates the importance of history in contemporary politics. The volume shows no signs of being outdated because political events, like the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) in 2010 and the outbreak of the Sunflower Movement in 2014, left profound impact on the political system that lingers today. These histories become the context in understanding the ups and downs of Taiwanese politics. Particularly in the early chapters of the book, the contributors provide a detailed account of the political changes that happened under the Kuomintang (KMT) government. For instance, the opening chapter highlights how the economic cooperation with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) served as a double-edged sword to Ma’s administration. While the cross-strait rapprochement, which crystalized the ECFA, was Ma’s “grand strategy” during his two terms (13), it also sowed the seeds of different social and economic problems in Taiwan, namely the over dependence on the PRC. This ultimately led to the occupation of the Legislative Yuan in the Sunflower Movement. The editors accurately point out that the shift of the PRC’s regime under Xi Jinping directly affected Ma’s governance as it made “Ma’s task of selling rapprochement much more difficult” (21).
Politics is not always simply reciprocal, and therefore, the fall of Ma’s popularity cannot directly explain the dominant performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in the 2016 elections. There was no guarantee that the DPP would reap the benefits of it. Austin Wang’s chapter on the DPP as the then-opposition party highlights this by tracing the rise of Tsai Ing-wen and shows how Tsai saved the party with her “reputation as a consensus seeker”—in other words, acceptable to all different factions within the party (59). It shows that Tsai’s mission, i.e., the revival of the DPP, was never an easy task. She consolidated her power in the party by a series of moves to centralize authority, which included changing the candidate selection method in preparation for elections (61).
The second feature of this edited volume shows how Taiwan is a good case study for a wide range of topics, especially in studies of democracy. Although Taiwan’s democracy is often hailed as one of the most democratic in Asia—with successive peaceful power alternations and a stable party system (chapter 5) since its democratic transition—it has its pitfalls, which can also be found in its democratic counterparts in the West. One example is the public support for democracy, as covered by Chang and Chu’s chapter. Despite a relatively high voter turnout, public trust towards political parties and politicians, as well as the overall quality of Taiwan’s democracy, alarmingly dropped during Ma’s terms (241). And the two-party system has reinforced political polarization. Chang and Chu identify the pattern of “commencing strongly, finishing miserably” in both Chen Shui-bian and Ma Ying-jeou’s presidencies. This pattern undermines public confidence in democracy, and anxiously, it also threatens Tsai Ing-wen’s political fortune in the remainder of her term.
Undeniably, the Sunflower Movement was the most significant political event in Ma’s years. Nevertheless, it was the culmination of different social movements under the KMT-led government, such as the Wild Strawberry Movement and the Anti-Media Monopoly Movement. Thus, this book competently features some chapters to analyze the emergence and impacts of these social movements. While Huang et al.’s chapter adopts a macro perspective to distinguish the protesters in different social movements, Dafydd Fell’s chapter answers the “so-what” question by assessing six types of impacts of social movements. Among those, the political impacts of social movements were the most significant, as it could be reflected from the electoral collapse of the KMT, the landslide victory of the DPP, and the emergence of new movement parties like the New Power Party and the Social Democratic Party.
This book’s focus is clearly on comparative politics, yet the last two chapters do shed light on the cross-strait relationship and foreign relations. Indeed, one of the legacies left behind by Ma’s government was the harmonious relationship across the straits. While the 2015 meeting between Ma Ying-jeou and Xi Jinping in Singapore was one highlight of the relationship between Taiwan and China, the table showing the cross-strait agreements signed during Ma’s years in Szu-yin Ho’s chapter represented a much more substantial outcome. The rapprochement with the PRC also enabled the KMT-led government to gain ground on participation in the international arena. As briefly mentioned in the volume, Taiwan was invited by the World Health Organization (WHO) to become an observer at the World Health Assembly (WHA) under the name of “Chinese Taipei.” It would be a timely effort if more in-depth analysis on Taiwan’s participation in the WHA had been included in the volume, amid the voice of protest against the exclusion of Taiwan in the WHO under the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. But this nit picking opinion should not prevent this edited volume from being required reading for understanding Taiwan politics.
Tommy Chung-Yin Kwan
The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong