Ethnic politics and democratic transition in Taiwan Текст научной статьи по специальности «Политологические науки»

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Политика

Fu-chang Wang

Ethnic Politics and Democratic Transition in Taiwan1

Introduction

The most significant set of social and political changes in Taiwan during the 1990s were, without any doubt, those that constituted the democratic transition; this transition, which started in 1987, transformed Taiwan from an authoritarian regime into a more liberal and democratic society by 1996. At about the same time, Taiwan also witnessed the first popularized attention of ethnicity issues when public debates over which groups should be considered ethnic minorities in Taiwan broke out in 1987, after Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators raised this issue in response to a contrary argument made by Mainlander Kuomintang (KMT) legislators in earlier congressional sessions, which then caught the attention of mass media and the general public. After more than 40 years of social integration among Taiwanese and Mainlanders, the two main ethnic groups of Taiwan,2 the resurgence of ethnic issues in the public sphere was usually seen as an unfortunate negative side effect of democratization and as being detrimental to the prospect of Taiwan's fragile new democracy. Ethnic tensions and conflicts then became aggravated and reached a climax during the 1994 election campaign between the enthusiastic supporters of the Chinese New Party (CNP) and the DPP, which resulted in one taxi driver's death and numerous incidents of violence.3

1 An early and much shorter draft of this paper was presented at the Workshop on "Ethnic Politics and Non-military Aspects of Security "organized by the Institute of History, Archeology and the Ethnography of the Peoples of Russian Far East, Far Eastern Federal University, held at Vladivostok, Russia, on August 23-25, 2011. I wish to thank all the participants for their questions and comments. The data sets analyzed in the paper are taken from "Taiwan Social Change Survey t^&^Wt) " (NSC 73-0301-H-001-18) conducted by Yang Kuo-su and Chiu Hei-yuan (#№-

in 1984, and "Taiwan Social Image Survey: July 1994 Wave 83

^ft&nmi.) ,"(NSC 83 -0301-H-001-050-B1)conducted by Yi Chin-chun in 1994, both

project were funded by Taiwan's National Science Council .

2 Mainlanders include those who migrated to Taiwan from China after 1945 and their descendants. They consisted of about 14% of Taiwan's population. Taiwanese, who made up about 86%, can be further divided into Holo (about 70%), Hakka (about 14%), and Aborigines (about 2%) based on their differences in ancestry (Holo and Hakka are Han descendants whose paternal ancestors came from China before 1895, while the Aborigines are of Austronesia's descent), languages, and cultures.

3 See [24] for more details of ethnic conflicts and tension during the 1994 election.

Thus, although Taiwan's democratic transition was initially a reaction to the Taiwanese's increasing demands for more political participation and a remedy to prior institutional ethnic discrimination against Taiwanese, which eventually brought about a more responsive and ethnically just political institutional arrangement than before, these positive aspects of the relations between democratization and ethnicity were quickly overshadowed by the overwhelmingly negative aspects of what happened afterward. Intensified ethnic conflicts and tensions were treated as if they were evils released out of a Pandora's Box opened up by democratization.

The negative view of the relation between ethnic politics and democratization also carried over to the explanation of how the democratization in Taiwan occurred in the first place. Ethnic politics issues were usually seen as playing little role in Taiwan's democratization transition. In such a view, ethnicity issues were, at best, background or motivating factors for the political challengers who had been fighting for the cause for years. As such, ethnic issues were constant factors and hence insufficient to explain Taiwan's democratic transition in themselves. This postulate is especially evident in existing explanations of Taiwan's democratization, which, as will be shown in this paper, greatly underestimated the importance of ethnic politics issues in this transition. This underestimation not only limits the explanatory power of current theories of Taiwan's democratization, but it also distorts our understandings of the cause, nature, and prospects of ethnic conflicts in a democratic system, especially in the case

By proposing a different way of analyzing ethnic politics issues, this paper demonstrates the critical role of ethnic politics in Taiwan's democratization transition. It also sheds new light on the causes of contemporary ethnic tensions in Taiwan.

Taiwan's democratic transition revisited

Under the current consensus among scholars, Taiwan's democratic transition consists of two phases [17]: a liberalization phase (1987 -1990) and a democratization phase (1991 - 1996). The liberalization phase began in 1987 when the KMT regime lifted martial law, which had been in effect since 1949, immediately after KMT regime's relocation to Taiwan. Then, in 1988, the ruling KMT lifted bans on forming new political parties and publishing new newspapers [1]. The democratization phase began in 1991 when all seats in the National Assembly were open to election for the first time since 1948. In 1992, the government granted the election of all members of Legislative Yuan (the national legislative body). After restoring the National Congress made up of representatives from all Chinese provinces in Taiwan in 1950, regular elections of national congressional seats were suspended "pending the recovery of the Chinese Mainland" by the KMT regime in 1954, under Interpretation No. 31 of the Justices of the Constitutional Court, Judicial Yuan. Between 1969 and 1991, only some supplementary seats, which made up less than one-third of all congressional seats, were elected

in Taiwan, as a measure to placate the increasing demands for more political participation by Taiwanese. These institutional reforms were followed by the elections of the Governor of Taiwan Province for the first time, and Mayors of Taipei and Kaohsiung, for the first time since 1967 and 1980, respectively, when the two cities became special cities under the central government's direct control. The transformation concluded in 1996 when the Republic of China (ROC) was directly elected by popular vote for the first time. The ROC President previously had been elected by members of National Assembly, which was dominated by Mainlander members representing all Chinese provinces before 1991.

Before the transition, the KMT had restricted citizens' basic democratic political rights to organize political parties, to express different opinions, and to elect public officials at the highest levels. By 1996, when this political transformation was complete, the government had met almost every major demand for political reforms made by the opposition camp since the 1970s.

Before moving to discuss and re-evaluate current explanations of Taiwan's democratic transition, let us first consider some of its unique characteristics from different perspectives. These unique features, which distinguish the Taiwan case from others, had a profound impact on how it occurred.

1. Unique Characteristics of Taiwan's Democratization Transition

AccordingtoLinJih-wen,Taiwan'sdemocratizationtransformation had two unique characteristics compared to other cases: 1) the ruling KMT regime initiated and actively engaged in democratic reforms when it was in power and still won the majority of votes in every election; and 2) the KMT regime continued to win elections and to dominate Taiwan's politics after the opening of electoral competition [18]. After democratic reforms were undertaken by the late President Chiang Ching-kuo in 1986-87, the KMT candidate, incumbent President Lee Teng-hui who had succeeded Chiang after his death in 1988, was able to win the first popular presidential election of Taiwan in 1996 by a landslide margin. In fact, the KMT was probably the only authoritarian regime to remain in power after a democratization transition in the so-called "third wave democratization." The KMT regime remained in power until 2000, when it accidentally lost the second popular presidential election to the DPP because of internal power strife.

There was, however, another important dimension of this transformation besides the usual democratization aspect: the indigenization of national political institutions, which is typically referred to as the bentuhua (^i^b, which literally means "indigenization") aspect [28]. The opening of elections of all national congressional seats and the ROC President to voters in Taiwan in the 1990s signified that the ruling KMT regime in Taiwan had officially changed its position on the KMT's previous claim that it lawfully represented all of China. In effect, the China-centered national framework underlying the entire national political structure since the KMT regime's relocation to Taiwan

in 1949 was gradually replaced by a newly emerging Taiwan-centered national framework, in which national political institutions represent only citizens of Taiwan within the national territory it had effectively ruled since 1949, and not all of China. This was quite a significant change, as the KMT regime's main excuse for refusing to implement full democracy was that national institutions in Taiwan were representing the temporarily lost China Mainland in a state of national emergency. This excuse, which may be quite unthinkable from a retrospective point of view, seemed to work to some degree for more than 30 years, as KMT candidates were able to win every local election (in the sense of obtaining majority votes and winning most public offices) during the period.

The question, then, is: How can we account for the significant changes? Why did the KMT regime initiate reforms and abandon claims that seemed to work before? What changed in the 1980s?

2. Current Explanations of Democratization in Taiwan

Political scientists' current explanations of democratization in Taiwan fall into two types of arguments. The first type of argument is typically called the political process model, which emphasizes the role of political elites and their interactions.1 Given that the KMT regime initiated democratic reforms when it was still in firm control of Taiwan's politics, an early explanation of the democratizing transition assigned a critical role to late President Chiang Ching-kuo's active strategies and manipulation [9]. This type of explanation implied that Chiang designed these reforms out of his own good intentions. Others immediately criticized this explanation for failing to take the role of the opposition movement into consideration and for overemphasizing the influence of one man's will at the expense of historical structural pressures or factors [28]. A thesis proposed by Cheng Tun-jen [7] provided a better explanation along this line of argument. According to Cheng, the key to Taiwan's political liberalization opening in the mid-1980s was the changing pattern of political cooperation and competition among elites of different factions within the ruling camp (reformative vs. conservative) and the challenging camp (moderate vs. radical). Specifically, it was cooperation between the reformative and moderate factions to gain an upper hand in dealing with the conservatives and radicals from their respective camps that accounted for the liberalizing transition. Lin Chia-lung [18] also pointed to the changing patterns of elite cooperation when he explained Taiwan's democratic transition. He argued that with the support of Taiwanese people and cooperation of DPP elites, President Lee Teng-hui of the KMT was able to implement critical democratic reforms in the 1990s.

1 For early discussions on the arguments of this thesis based on other countries' cases, see Rustow [23] and Przeworski [22].

A second type of argument for Taiwan's democratization also attributed the critical factor to the elites' action based on morality. Wu Nai-the [33] argued that the most important changing factor in Taiwan's democratic transition was the changing attitudes of the challenging elites, who fearlessly faced the threat of repression and sacrificed themselves for the cause of democratization. Wu specifically identified the said attitude changes among opposition leaders and their supporters in the aftermath of 1979 Kaohsiung Incident, when all prominent leaders in the opposition camp were arrested for treason and for their involvement in an incident that resulted in injuries to hundreds of policemen during their violent clash with demonstrators. Leaders and supporters of the opposition camp were usually intimidated by the repression of the KMT regime before the 1979 Incident and dared not openly showed their support for political prisoners. Such an atmosphere had effectively prevented ordinary citizens from actively participating in political opposition or even merely showing support for the political opposition. The situation had changed, however, when the eight opposition leaders were charged with treason and publicly trialed in court martial for Kaohsiung Incident and the murders of three family members of one accused leader (Lin Yi-hsiung during the trial

on the very symbolic day of February 28, 1980.1 Instead of pleading guilty and begging for mercy during the court martial as they were "supposed to" in front of the domestic and foreign press, the opposition leaders took the opportunity of the first-ever open court trial to express their convictions on democracy and to elaborate their stand on the issue of Taiwan's self-determination and independence, which were still considered as political taboos and could constitute treason if openly advocated at the time. The opposition leaders' dedication and sacrifices for the cause of democracy, Wu argued, had moved and inspired not only a younger generation of new opposition leaders who rose to fill the positions vacated by the imprisoned opposition leaders, but also many indifferent by-standers, and turned them into sympathizers or even supporters for the opposition camp. A good indication of such a change was that these political prisoners were treated as heroes during electoral campaigns, and their wives received the highest numbers of votes in their respective districts when they ran for public offices on their husbands' behalf during the following elections in the early 1980s. The repressive measures that had been quite successful on previous occasions in intimidating political dissidents were no longer an effective and reliable political option for the KMT regime. The ruling KMT was forced to take a different strategy, that is, to recognize the existence of opposition groups, and to negotiate with them and/or compete with them in elections [33]. The critical change, therefore, is that opposition

1 The February 28th Incident of 1947 was the first and most significant incident of the clashes between local Taiwanese and their new Chinese rulers after Taiwan was returned to Chinese rule at the end of World War II. More than 10,000 Taiwanese, among them many elites, were killed during the aftermath of the so-called March Massacres, according to some accounts. See Kerr [13] and Lai, Myers, and Wei [14] for more details.

elites disregarded an almost certain fate of repression and acted on their political convictions out of their moral values on democracy.

Both lines of arguments point to changes in the political elites, be they patterns of cooperation or the changing attitudes of opposition leaders when confronting regime repression. Although these arguments are quite powerful or even convincing in correctly identifying and describing how the political elites in both camps critically changed such that they contributed to the democratic transition, the arguments failed to explain why.

3. Some Unanswered Questions in Current Explanations

The two leading explanations leave some unanswered questions. The question of why the political elites changed their patterns of competition and cooperation is quite important in explaining the timing of these changes. We cannot fully explain Taiwan's democratic transition unless we can properly determine why the reformative faction elites of the KMT regime were willing to negotiate with the opposition camp or initiate the political reforms at this particular time or historical conjuncture. Why did these changes in elite action or interactions not occur earlier? In fact, some of the most visible cases of political repression since 1947 had just occurred in the aftermath of the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident, not even seven years before the democratic transition began, which was followed by a series of arrests of political prisoners on treason charges and even the murder of a dissent who returned to Taiwan from the United States to visit his family.1 These incidents of harsh repression created a general atmosphere of terror within the opposition camp. Yet the regime's repressive measures by were replaced quite rapidly by more tolerant measures that marked the beginning of Taiwan's democratic transition. The KMT elites apparently felt some new pressures at this time to change their strategy of how to deal with their political challengers. The question remains: What was the new pressure at this time? Existing theories of Taiwan's liberalizing opening or democratic transition, especially the political-process arguments have been quite vague on this point. Whatever changes had occurred were typically treated as exogenous variables or background factors for the theoretically more interesting and important changes in elite actions and patterns of interactions. Cheng Tun-jen, for instance, argued that the main reason for the failure of opposition during its first wave of challenge in 1977 and 1979 was that elites in the ruling KMT and opposition leaders did not communicate with each other:

The 1977 election riot resulted in the ascent of the conservative wing within the KMT, while the Assembly's politics radicalized the majority of

1 Professor Chen Wen-chen from Carnegie Mellon University was found dead on the

National Taiwan University campus after he was interviewed by officials from one of KMT regime's secret service organs, Taiwan Garrison Command Headquarters, in 1981 (see [33, p. 91-92; 34, p.98]).

the leaders in the political opposition. Locked in a situation of strategic interaction, the radical opposition and the conservative KMT cadres did not communicate: the former did not heed the warnings of the latter, with the latter did not consult with the former about suspension of elections [of the National Assembly after the US broke its diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 1978] [7, p.493].

The result was, of course, the violent clash in the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident. In this account, the focus of explaining the democratic transition was clearly on the strategies and actions of the political elites under the new political atmosphere. Accordingly, "the subsequent success of the moderate wing of the political opposition can be explained by its adoption of a different strategy" [7, p. 493]. Cheng, however, did not explored in detail the changing political atmosphere that made the changing strategies of the elites possible in the first place. Why was the reformative faction able to ascend within the KMT regime to change its strategy of dealing with political challengers? And why did the previously prohibited issue of Taiwan's future become a viable option in the opposition's political agenda and strategy in the 1980s?

Wu Nai-teh provided an important addition to our understanding on this point when he pointed out that the moral obligations felt by some opposition leaders motivated them to neglect the personal and familial costs of regime repression in pursuing democratic reforms [33, p. 91]. The opposition leaders' fearless actions broke the vicious circle of fear and effectiveness of regime repression, eventually forcing the KMT regime to change its political strategy and reluctantly compromise to initiate the long overdue reforms.

Despite the valuable contribution of Wu's argument, however, some important questions remain unanswered: Why did some opposition leaders change their attitudes after 1980? More importantly, why was more of the public willing to show their support for the opposition leaders? Instead of providing a clear explanation of why the political elites and the general public changed their behaviors and actions at this particular time, Wu's paper offered only speculations on these critical issues. Wu suspected that the wide acceptance of democratic values among the younger generations because of expanding mass education and economic developments might be the reasons for such changes [33, p. 93-94].

I will address these unanswered questions by reconsidering the role of ethnic politics in this transition. Previous studies typically have treated ethnic politics issues as background or motivation factors. For instance, Cheng [7, p.497-498] demonstrated this position when he stated:

The sub-ethnic cleavage between Taiwanese and mainlanders, as reflected in the political platform and elite composition of the opposition, provided the basic social framework within which the democratic movement unfolded. ... Democratization could be and

had been interpreted as a redistribution of political power between the mainlanders and the Taiwanese.1

To Cheng, the ethnic issues or factors played only a small role in accounting for the great changes, because he considered them to be constant factors, rather than variables. He implicitly assumed that political elites of both the KMT regime and the opposition shared the same understandings of whether the political arrangements were fair for the Taiwanese and what democratization would mean to Taiwan's ethnic distribution of political power. Furthermore, the sense of ethnic discrimination against Taiwanese at the national level was deemed to be widely known and shared among the general public after the KMT regime suspended all elections for national congressional members in the 1950s. Thus, they believed that Taiwan's political opposition camp had been acting on this long-existing political discontent with limited success in forcing the KMT regime to concede to their demands. The critical factor or variable that distinguished the success of the democratic movement in the 1980s from its previous failure in the 1970s was the changing patterns of elite cooperation and competition, according to this thesis.

These explanations greatly overlooked the positive contribution of ethnic political issues in this process. Specifically, this thesis focuses only on the political elites and fails to pay enough attention to the general public's potential contribution and the importance of raising self-determination issues in public platforms. The main problem with the assumption that most people shared or accepted what the opposition elites knew or believed about ethnic political inequality in Taiwan is that this assumption did not match reality. Wu argued that most people knew that the KMT was unfair to Taiwanese but were too scared to join or support the opposition movement before 1980. This cannot explain Taiwanese's voting behavior on secret ballots, however. Despite the "obvious" ethnic discrimination against Taiwanese under the KMT regime's authoritarian rule, the KMT regime was able to gain the majority support of not only Mainlanders but also most Taiwanese in local elections. Candidates of opposition camp, who were the champions of Taiwan's democratic reforms and who fought against ethnic discrimination of Taiwanese by the government, received only limited support in these elections, about 30 percent or less of the votes in most cases.2

1 A similar position and statement can be found in Lin Jih-wen's [19, p.13] account of Taiwan's democratization.

2 Besides the often-mentioned factors of economic prosperity and societal stability under the KMT rule and allegations that elections were rigged, several factors accounted for such a voting pattern among the Taiwanese: 1) the KMT regime incorporated many Taiwanese elites to run on its ballot through a patronage system; 2) Most Taiwanese voters were in fact casting votes to support their local headman rather than supporting the KMT regime in these local elections. The KMT regime interpreted the results of these elections, however, as indicating popular support for the ruling party; 3) The KMT regime neither encouraged nor supported Mainlanders to run in these elections, which effectively eliminated the importance of ethnic factors during electoral competitions [26].

A possible answer to this puzzling phenomenon is that while many Taiwanese challenging elites perceived that they were being discriminated against ethnically, KMT's Taiwanese elites and the general public did not share this perception. The fact that Taiwanese KMT political elites rarely, or even never, openly discussed the ethnic-inequality issue corroborated this assertion. Not only did the KMT's Taiwanese elites never publicly complain about ethnic discrimination, but some of them were even openly opposed to and denied claims made by their fellow Taiwanese in the opposition camp. For instance, in 1979, when the opposition camp organized around the Formosa Magazine to challenge the ruling KMT, Lin Yang-kang a Taiwanese elite

who was appointed by the KMT regime to be the Governor of Taiwan Province, openly denied allegations of the government's discrimination against Taiwanese in political appointments to the press on several occasions.1 Other high-ranking Taiwanese KMT officials, including Lee Teng-hui , Chiu Chuan-huang (^J'J^) also made similar

public states on different occasions.2 Regardless of their real intentions or beliefs, these public statements by the Taiwanese elites whom the KMT regime deliberately promoted to highly visible public offices to serve as tokens had posed an important challenge to the opposition camp in their allegation of the regime's ethnic discrimination.

The assumption of the general public's wide acceptance of the sense of the government's ethnic discrimination was even more problematic. Some scattered evidence indicated that although Mainlanders were indeed over-represented in national political positions, such as the Cabinet, the National Congress, and higher echelons of central government, most Taiwanese did not think that there was an unfair distribution of political power among the Taiwanese as a whole. As the analysis of survey data in Table 1 indicates, when the first Social Change Survey in Taiwan was conducted in 1984, most Taiwanese reported that they did not think that Mainlanders were more socially influential than Taiwanese, providing clear evidence for the lack of an ethnic-minority consciousness among most of them at the time.3

1 Lin made the statement when he was interviewed by an Australian reporter (See United Daily News, May 17, 1979, p. 2).

2 Lee Teng-hui, made the statement in his capacity as the Governor of Taiwan Province at the Taiwan Provincial Assembly when the issue was raised by councilmen (China Times, December 3, 1982, p.2). He made the same claim again to some visiting foreign scholars when he became Vice-President of the ROC in 1984 (China Times, November 28, 1984, p. 2). Chiu, Chuan-huang made a similar statement in the Legislator Yuan when he served as the vice-Premier (China Times, March 10, 1984, p. 2; March 17, 1984, p. 2).

3 In this survey, respondents were asked to evaluate 15 different social groups in terms of their social influence. The 15 groups included: political parties (KMT, opposition camp), different occupational groups (such as media, university professors, military personnel), and ethnic groups (Taiwanese and Mainlanders). Table 1 analyzes the result of their evaluation of Taiwanese's social influence as a group as compared to Mainlanders among respondents from different ethnic groups.

Table 1. Evaluation of Social Influence among Different Groups by Ethnic Groups,

1984 Taiwan Social Change Survey Data

Ethnic Groups Social Influence of Mainlanders Compared to Taiwanese Total

Less Same More

Holo 568 (26.2%) 1160 (53.6%) 438 (20.2%) 2166 [74.7%]

Hakka 73 (26.3%) 155 (55.8%) 50 (18.0%) 278 [9.6%]

Mainlanders 151 (37.3%) 206 (50.9%) 48 (11.9%) 405 [14.0%]

Aborigines 19 (37.3%) 23 (45.1%) 9 (17.6%) 51 [1.8%]

Total 811 (28.0%) 1544 (53.2%) 545 (18.8%) 2900 100.0%

Pearson Chi-Squares = 31.091, DF = 6, p < .000

Source: Taiwan Social Change Survey, 1984

( ): Row percentage ; [ ]: Column percentage

According to this survey, the sense of ethnic discrimination was shared by only a minority of Taiwanese in 1984: Only about 20% of Taiwanese interviewed thought that Mainlanders had more social influence than Taiwanese, compared to more than half of the respondents who thought their respective influences were about the same, and another 26% who, in contrast, thought Taiwanese are more influential than Mainlanders. Against the "common sense" claimed by opposition leaders, most Taiwanese did not share interpretations of the KMT regime's discrimination against Taiwanese as was typically proposed by the opposition camp in its political platform at this time.

But, why? How can we explain this puzzling fact?

4. A Possible Answer to the Puzzle

From a retrospective point of view, the answer to such a puzzle can be quite straightforward. Under the Chinese national imagination, which perceives China as consisting of all 36 Chinese provinces, and of which Taiwan is only one province, the national political body should be designed to represent all Chinese Provinces. Since Mainlanders were considered to be political representatives of their respective provinces in Taiwan under the Chinese national imagination, as proposed by the KMT regime, Mainlanders' overall over-representation in national political institutions was justifiable and even deemed as necessary for the national interest in a stage of national emergency. With the support of United States to keep the KMT regime's delegates from taking the Chinese seats in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly and the UN Security Counsel, KMT regime, which relocated to Taiwan after it was defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, still enjoyed

more formal diplomatic recognition in the international community than the newly founded CCP regime before 1970. The international recognition provided strong support for KMT regime's claim of being China's only legitimate government, despite constant challenges by the former Soviet Union and its allies in the UN after 1949. Domestically, the KMT regime utilized the legitimacy claim under a state of national emergency as its rationale to "temporarily" suspend some political rights prescribed in the ROC National Constitution, which had been in effect since 1948, and to postpone the implementation of full democracy. The fact that the political opposition camp did not, or dared not openly challenge the Chinese national imagination, for various reasons, and only demanded to have more Taiwanese representation in these national political institutions before 1980 perversely reinforced the KMT regime's legitimacy claim.

The combinations of these internal and external factors in favor of the Chinese national imagination help explain why most Taiwanese did not develop or share a sense of being discriminated against ethnically under an "obvious" situation of ethnic disparity between Taiwanese and Mainlander representations in national political institutions. And yet, how was the KMT regime able to maintain its claim during the 1970s when the external support of its legitimacy deteriorated?

The integrity of the Chinese national imagination gradually became vulnerable when the KMT regime lost its seat in the UN to the CCP regime in 1971 and then also lost its diplomatic ties with most major nations in the world during the following decade. The most devastating incident was that the United States formally recognized the CCP regime and broke off its official diplomatic relations with the KMT regime in 1978. These changes in the international arena posed a serious threat to the legitimacy claim of the KMT regime as the only lawful government of all China and provided the opposition camp with an opportunity to demand political reforms and democratization.

A new generation of political and cultural elites indeed rose to demand political reforms at this particular time of political crisis. In 1971, more than 20 Taiwanese and Mainlander young elites, who had finished higher education under the KMT regime, joined the reorganized editorial board of the Intellectual Magazine which literally mean "University") and began to seriously criticize the government's neglect of social-inequality issues, as well as the apathy of government officials and citizens, which stirred many discussions.1 In October 1971, they jointly proposed an outline for political reforms at the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the ROC. Unlike previous political dissidents, most of these young elites were not affiliated with the opposition camp at the time. When the Intellectual group later parted ways, some of them, mostly Taiwanese, joined the opposition camp and went on to organize and publish the first dissident magazine

1 In a series of commentaries entitled "An Analysis of Social Forces in Taiwan," Chang et.al. [4; 5; 6] critically analyzed the most urgent issues that different social groups faced at the time.

by Taiwanese, Taiwan Political Review in 1975. After

the opposition camp won an unprecedented number of seats of public offices in the 1977 local elections, they further escalated their efforts by forming the Formosa Magazine and tried to establish local chapters to build a quasi-political party to coordinate their efforts and staged many mass rallies and demonstrations in 1979.

The KMT regime's response to the legitimacy crisis posed by its diplomatic setbacks and mounting domestic pressures for political reforms in the 1970s included promoting more Taiwanese to highranking governmental positions and allowing some regular elections for supplementary seats in the National Congress starting in 1972 [28]. The promotion of more Taiwanese to high-profile government posts was an intentional policy architected by the late President Ching-kuo 1910 - 1988), which was commonly known as

the policy of or literally, "promote Taiwanese youth."1 In

May 1972, when Chiang Ching-kuo became the Premier (President of Executive Yuan, the central government's main administrative organ), he unprecedentedly appointed six Taiwanese to serve in ministerial positions in his Cabinet, including the posts of Vice Premier, Minister of Interior, Minister of Transportation, and three Ministers without Portfolio.2 Together, the six Taiwanese made up nearly one-third of all members in the Cabinet. Previously there had been no more than three Taiwanese in the Cabinet.3 The KMT regime under Chiang's direction also appointed a Taiwanese to serve as the Taiwan Provincial Governor, the first Taiwanese to take this highly symbolic position since 1945.4 In the following years, the positions of vice-presidents of the other four major governmental organs, which were usually filled by Mainlanders, were gradually replaced by Taiwanese as well: Vice Speaker of the Legislative Yuan and Vice President of the Judicial Yuan in 1972, Vice President of Control Yuan in 1973, and finally, the Vice President of the Examination Yuan in 1984. These new arrangements opened up space for Taiwanese to take a larger role in the national government.

More importantly, as a direct response to the increasing demands of more political participation at the national level, the KMT regime also allowed regular elections for supplementary seats in the national

1 was coined as a catchy term because it had the same pronunciation as the name of a then very famous female singer (

2 This fact was greatly emphasized in every major newspapers at the time and treated as a policy to incorporate more local Taiwanese to serve in the national government (see, for instance, United Daily News and China Times, May 30, 1972, p. 2).

3 According to Wei [30], there was only one Taiwanese in the four Cabinets formed between 1950 and 1963, two Taiwanese in 1966 and 1969, and three Taiwanese in 1970. Chiang's appointment of six Taiwanese in 1972, therefore, was a major change [30, p.24-25].

4 Between 1972 and 1994, when it was finally opened to election, the position of Taiwan Provincial Governor was filled by Taiwanese appointed by the KMT regime. A similar arrangement was also applied to the position of Taipei Mayor.

congress to be held starting 1972.1 These placatory measures seemed to work for the regime, as the KMT candidates, mostly Taiwanese, were able to win a majority of votes in these elections for supplementary seats in the national congress, as well as the local elections. The KMT candidates received at least 65% of all votes in these elections. In the 1972 election for supplementary seats in the national congress, KMT candidates received about 73% (for Legislators) and 65% (for members of National Assembly) of votes. In 1975, the KMT's share votes in the Legislators election increased to 77%. As KMT candidates were able to win the most seats, the KMT usually interpreted these election results as evidence of Taiwanese's wide acceptance of the legitimacy of its rule.

It should be noted that these political reforms of permitting more Taiwanese political participation in national politics during the 1970s were instituted without compromising the integrity of the Chinese national imagination, which stipulated a national political body representing all of China. Taiwanese were allowed to have more political participation than they had before 1972, when Taiwanese representation in national political institutions had been limited to its proportion of being one of the 36 Chinese provinces, as in 1948. After 1972, Taiwanese representation at these national institutions, however, was still far from proportional to the general demographic profile of Taiwan's ethnic composition in Taiwan. While Taiwanese constituted more than 85% of the population, their representation in the national political institution was still limited to a minority status by design. The idea of maintaining a government representing all of China remains the cornerstone of the basic framework of organizing national political institutions.

Under the dominance of the Chinese national imagination, however, some Mainlanders interpreted these placatory measures by the KMT regime started in the 1970s as "favoritism" toward Taiwanese at the expense of Mainlander youths [21; 30, p.25; 31]. In fact, many Mainlanders complained that Taiwanese were a "privileged group" in the news media and urged that appointments to governmental positions should be based on ability and qualifications rather than on provincial backgrounds. They also felt that they were being deprived of opportunities for political participation, as their chance of winning the newly opened supplementary seats in the national congress were very slim without the KMT's endorsements and support. This kind of argument, mainly by Mainlanders who had gone overseas for advanced education, could be seen every now and then in the mainstream news media during the 1970s and early 1980s and was quite popular among young Mainlanders. As the KMT regime strictly prohibited any public

1 The election of additional seats in the national congress in 1969 was designed to be an one-shot deal. Those who were elected in 1969 enjoyed the same privileges as those who were elected back in 1947-48 to be exempted from re-election until the recovery of the Chinese Mainland when the second national election could be held. Those who were elected after 1972, however, served a three-year term and therefore were subjected to regular elections.

discussion related to Taiwan Independence issues, the Chinese national imagination had never been seriously challenged publicly by the political opposition camp inside the island until the late 1970s, especially during the 1980 Kaohsiung Incident trial.1 It was no wonder that many Taiwanese did not think Mainlanders had more social influence than the Taiwanese, even as late as 1984.

The key to explaining the democratic transition in Taiwan, then, is the spread of ethnic minority consciousness among the Taiwanese populace, who had not shared this understanding. Unlike what Wu has argued, I think that this was more a matter of persuasion. In a society with potentially conflicting views of national imagination, one needs to be persuaded to accept a certain version of moral values before he or she can be moved or touched by certain elites' dedication or sacrifice for defending the specific set of moral values. By 1978, some newly emerged leaders in the opposition camp already sensed that to achieve full democracy in Taiwan, they needed to neutralize the KMT regime's excuses and to directly attack the core of its legitimacy argument, that is, the Chinese national imagination.

The first published document that discussed issues related to an alternative national imagination appeared in a book by Annette Lu (S which proposed that Taiwan's future should be determined by the 17 million people in Taiwan, included Mainlanders [20, p. 243].2 Lu's book, however, was banned from circulation and confiscated by the KMT regime immediately after it was published in 1979. Lu later became one of the eight opposition leaders to be trialed in courts-martial after the Kaohsiung Incident. The banned book nevertheless managed to reach the hands of other younger opposition leaders, and the new idea spread to the general public during early 1980s.

What else has changed?

After the setback of the 1979 incident, the opposition camp began to re-group following the successful campaigns in the 1980 election for supplementary seats of the national congress by the wives of imprisoned leaders, their attorneys at the trial, and some remaining leaders. They also began to organize and coordinate their efforts by identifying who were "real Dang-wai (jt^^b)" and proposed a common platform for the real opposition candidates. A very powerful slogan was proposed to emphasize the need to support a political force other than the ruling KMT regime to benefit from the checks and balances of a healthy democracy in the 1981 local election campaign.3 This slogan

1 The Taiwan Independence Movement has been quite active outside Taiwan since early 1950s, first in Japan and later in the US and other countries (see [27]).

2 Lu, a Harvard University graduate, pioneered Taiwan's Feminist Movement before she joined the opposition camp to run for Member of the National Assembly in 1978. She became the Vice-President of the Republic of China when the DPP won the Presidential Election in 2000 and 2004.

3 The theme slogan for the 1981 opposition campaign was: "Democracy needs Check-and-Balance, Dang-wai will perform the function (of Check and balance)"(^±#fj#-fj##£?b).

was quite powerful in appealing to the public at the time against a background of many incidents of government corruption, coal mining field disasters, and financial crises in the early 1980s. The opposition camp had convinced many people that the authoritarian KMT regime was responsible for these incidents, because of its lack of an effective check-and-balance mechanism in national political institutions. These "democratic demands" by the opposition, however, could have been met by allowing for more Taiwanese participation in national politics without compromising the Chinese national imagination's basic framework. In other words, re-election of all congressional seats was not a necessary means to achieve this end. The KMT regime indeed allowed for more supplementary seats in the national congress to be elected, as a gesture of responding to these demands during the 1980s.1 These supplementary seats, nevertheless, never exceeded more than 30 percent of all seats in these national congressional organs. The result was that even though more avenues of democratic political participation were provided, Taiwanese remained powerless in national politics. Apparently, the opposition camp needed to articulate the need for a more drastic change in national political institutions on grounds other than democratic rights.

1. The emergence of an alternative national imagination

As the new generation rose to compete for leadership roles within the opposition camp after 1980, some newly emerged radical factions picked up what Lu had left behind in her 1979 banned book and began to propose an alternative national imagination that saw Taiwan as a sovereign state to counteract the effectiveness of the KMT regime's Chinese national imagination in refusing to implement full democracy.

The idea of Taiwan as a de-facto sovereign state, which had been severely repressed for its de-jure "Taiwan Independence" implication by the KMT regime during the trial of the Kaohsiung Incident, began to emerge in the opposition camp's political platform in the early 1980s. Although it was disguised as a basic human right in a democratic system rather than an outright claim for pursuing Taiwan independence, the demand of self-determination by the Taiwanese people in the 1983 campaign platform by Dang-wai (literally, outside the KMT party) camp nevertheless paved the way for the emergence of an alternative national imagination in the public political arena.2 Not surprisingly, the demand for Taiwanese self-determination was interpreted as a radicalized act of openly advocating for Taiwan independence by the conservative faction within the ruling KMT regime, especially the security sector, which retaliated by applying more aggressive repression measures on the opposition.

1 The number of legislative seats open to election in 1972 was 29, and 38 in 1975. It increased to 64 at 1980, 65 at 1983, 73 at 1986, and 101 in 1989 [25, p. 68].

2 The first common platform reads: "Taiwan's future should be determined by the 18 millions population in Taiwan.'\15, p.191].

2. A new concept of political ethnic equality

A related change that followed the emergence of the new national imagination was a novel way of defining fair political rights for its citizenry. Since the newly emerged Taiwanese national imagination defined Taiwan and the offshore islands as the sovereign state's substantial boundary, it entailed a new standard for evaluating ethnic equality in terms of the political power distribution within the "national boundary." As such, in the new Taiwanese national framework, Mainlanders were now perceived as Taiwanese citizens with equal rights like all others, rather than political representatives of Chinese provinces in Taiwan with special statuses. Since Mainlanders made up less than 14% of Taiwan's population, the opposition camp saw their over-representation, and in most cases, overwhelming dominance in national politics as evidences of the KMT regime's intentional and systematic discrimination against Taiwanese.

This new standard of evaluating ethnic equality in political power, ironically, was mainly developed by the young Taiwanese elites in the opposition camp as a counter-argument to the proclaimed sense of being an ethnically disadvantaged group among the younger Mainlanders. Many young Mainlanders who still embraced the Chinese national imagination were quite upset about the KMT regime's policy of promoting Taiwanese youths to certain highly visible political posts and began to argue that Mainlanders had became an ethnic minority in Taiwan, especially after 1980. Along with the rising intensity of political confrontation between the KMT and the opposition camp after 1980, many Mainlanders felt that the KMT regime, instead of using harsh measures, was making concessions to the opposition's demands by allowing more congressional seats to be opened to elections. Given the previous electoral results, younger Mainlanders felt that they have little chance to benefit from these political reforms. Also, the KMT's policy to have more Taiwanese representation in national as well as provincial politics also led many Mainlanders to complain that certain political posts had been "reserved" for Taiwanese since 1972. When they returned to Taiwan for short visits, many Mainlander scholars based in the United States claimed in major newspapers that Mainlanders had become an ethnic minority in political and economic arenas.1 The political discourse of Mainlanders as an ethnic minority was also echoed by some Taiwanese legislators in their statements during congressional sessions (e.g., Chung, 1983; Lin, 1984). In 1987, two young KMT Mainlander legislators made the same statement publicly in the congress

1 For example, Yang Li-yu Chiu Hungdah and Kao Zi-ming (^f^), just to

name a few, had made this kind of statement in special commentary columns in the China Time (+S flfft), one the most widely circulated newspapers in Taiwan in the early 1980s. For Kao, see March 28, 1984, February 12, 1987, and February 16, 1987, p. 2. For Chiu, see April 19, 1986, and February 12, 1987, p. 2. For Yang, see January 16, 1987, p.2.

and in the news media.1 Although we may never know for sure why the KMT regime allowed this type of argument to appear regularly in the news media and even in the National Congress at this time, its consequence of provoking a counter argument by the opposition camp was nevertheless quite evident.

After the DPP announced it establishment in 1986 and won 11 legislative seats in the 1986 election, ethnic issues became a heatedly debated topics in the National Congress in 1987. Although oppositioncamp leaders had long been challenging the KMT regime for excluding Taiwanese from fair political participation, they raised the issue again in the 1987 congressional sessions in a defensive way, that is, to reject the ethnic minority argument made by Mainlander scholars and political elites.2 This debate was covered by the newspapers in great detail and scope and aroused the first open discussion on the issue since 1950.

During this debate, the opposition camp proposed a new concept of ethnic equality to reject the argument of Mainlanders as an ethnic minority in Taiwan. The under-representation of Taiwanese in the National Congress (17%), high-ranking government positions (14%), the KMT's central committee (13.6%), high-ranking military personnel (4.3%), police (7.3%), and university presidents (25%) was disclosed by counting the personnel rosters of these institutions to illustrate Taiwanese's disadvantages as a true ethnic minority in Taiwan.3 Rather than just demanding more Taiwanese representation, the demographic profile of Taiwanese constituting 85% of Taiwan's population was used specifically as a new baseline for evaluating the degree of ethnic inequality at the national level. A possible reason for young Mainlanders elites to ignore these "obvious" facts of ethnic disparity was that they had taken Mainlanders' over-representation in the national institutions for granted because they still accepted the Chinese national imagination. In contrast, the new standard of evaluating ethnic political equality proposed by DPP was developed on the implicit assumption of treating Taiwan as a de-facto sovereign state.

Although the demand for de-jure Taiwan Independence was still not acceptable to most Taiwanese during the 1980s, the demands for more ethnic political equality in the de-facto sovereign state of Taiwan, which was the core essence of the new ethnic concept, began to receive more public attention among Taiwanese in 1987. In particular, the aging Mainlander members of the National Congress who had been in

1 Jan Han-shen (ffi^i) made the statement in the Legislative Yuan on March 10, 1987 [12, p. 18]. According to Wu Su-jen's rebuttal, cited in Footnote 23 in this paper, Chao Shaw-kang (M.'}'i) expressed the same opinion during a magazine interview.

2 These statement was made by DPP legislator Wu Su-jen who requested the KMT to give up its previous policy of discrimination against Taiwanese in order to create a true democracy and peace in Taiwan. She claimed that the opposition camp's efforts in pursuit of ethnic political equality had been distorted by KMT regime, the media, some overseas Mainlander scholars, and her fellow legislators. See the news coverage on China Times Daily, March 25, 1987, p. 2.

3 The record of Wu Su-jen's full statements and argument appeared in the Bulletin of Legislative Yuan ( (A&R&ft) ), 76 (24): 27-30 (March 25, 1987).

office for nearly 40 years since 1948 without being re-elected and who still made up the majority of seats in the National Congress had become a highly visible and easy target for political reformative demands by the opposition camp. The DPP launched a new campaign for the reelection of all congressional seats in November 1987 by organizing a series of mass rallies and demonstrations. The mounting pressure for reforming the National Congress had turned the once-proud "symbol of legitimacy" representing the whole of China into a political liability for the KMT regime. The question for the ruling KMT regime at this time was not whether or to reform the National Congress, but rather to what extent would the inevitable reforms take place. The opposition camp began to propose the most radical reform package: All seats of the National Congress were to be elected by voters in Taiwan, and no special seats to represent the Chinese provinces in the mainland should be reserved in the new congress.1 The KMT regime, however, was quite reluctant to make such concessions on these issues.

This issue's symbolic importance can be further illustrated by re-examining the critical changes in Taiwan's democratic transition.

3. Rethinking Critical Changes in Taiwan's Democratic Transition

While most people would agree that Taiwan's democratization transition began in 1987 when martial law was lifted, there is little discussion on what was the most critical change in this long transition.2 By critical changes, I am referring to the most important issues in the series of democratizing reforms that the ruling KMT regime would not allow if it could have its way. It is quite important to identify the most critical changes, as this could help us better understand the transition. Based on my discussion on the third, and probably the most important unique characteristic of Taiwan's democratizing transition, the indigenization of the national political institutions, I argue that the elections of all congressional members in 1991 and 1992 qualified for such a critical change. Let me elaborate.

The opposition camp's increasing demands for political reforms as it gained more support among the general populace in the 1980s had forced the KMT regime to change its strategies of dealing with contentious challengers. In May 1986, President Chiang Ching-kuo instructed high-ranking cadres in the KMT to actively initiate the following reforms: 1) to replace martial law with a new National Security Law, 2) to draft and pass a Party Law, 3) to reform national

1 The opposition camp proposed the re-election of all congressional members in its platform during the 1978 supplementary election for National Assembly Delegates for the first time, and again in their joint statement on the national affairs (f^Aii^i^) after the election was suspended when the US announced its shifting recognition to PRC [15, p.128, 136]. The KMT regime, however, did not respond directly to this issue.

2 The most notable exception is Wu [33, p.73-74], who cited Dankwart A. Rustow's [23] work to discuss the key to the transition to democracy.

congressional organs, and 4) to extend the scope of local elections.1 These actions were meant to respond directly to some of the longstanding demands proposed by the opposition camp. In hindsight, all of these reforms were carried out and accomplished within the next decade in the exact sequence stated above. The respective importance of each reform to Taiwan's democratization transition, however, varied greatly.

By 1986, the first two items in the list of political reforms were actually in practice without legal recognition granted by the KMT regime. The integrity of martial law was already in jeopardy when thousands of social protests, which were still illegal under martial law, broke out during the early 1980s in Taiwan.2 These social movements and protests were inspired by an earlier political demonstration in Kaohsiung county staged by the opposition camp in January 1979, the first one under martial law, after the KMT regime arrested a prominent opposition leader, Yu Deng-Fa , and a series of political

rallies organized by the Formosa Magazine group in the same year, which eventually led to the outbreak of the Kaohsiung Incident. The KMT regime did not exercise severe repressive measures to deal with these protests, because there were simply too many incidents expressing grievances of a non-political nature, and because KMT supporters launched and participated in some of them.3 The proposition of replacing martial law with a new National Security Law to regulate the numerous social protests was therefore an ex-post remedy measure.

The proposition to draft and enact a Party Law was in a very similar situation. Although the KMT regime had banned the establishment of new political parties, the prohibition was challenged when the opposition camp established the Dang-wai Public Policy Research Association (in 1984 and functioned as a quasi-political party, even though it was illegal. In 1986, opposition leaders against the government regulation established the Democratic Progressive Party. President Chiang Ching-kuo later announced that his government was already preparing to lift the ban on political parties when he was interviewed by a reporter from the Washington Post. Given the political and social tone in the late-1980s in Taiwan, it would have been very costly for the KMT regime to try to defend martial law and the ban on forming political parties by taking repressive measures against offenders, as they did before 1979.

The first two items in the list of political reforms became, in a sense, bargaining chips for the KMT regime to exchange for more desirable compromises during its political negotiation with the opposition camp. When the pressure for congressional reforms

1 See United Daily News May 14, 1986, p. 2.

2 According to Chang et.al. [3], there were 2,892 incidents of rallies and demonstrations on the streets between 1983 and 1988 to protest for environmental, economic, and other social issues.

3 Chang et al.'s [3, p.134] study indicated that about 37% of all protests between 1983 and 1988 were not led by the opposition camp or by the DPP.

increased in the mid-1980s, the KMT regime was very reluctant to allow a new National Congress to be elected entirely by people in Taiwan without some special seats representing the mainland provinces, given the symbolic significance of the latter in maintaining a Chinese national framework. KMT leaders were in fact willing to lift martial law and to allow new political parties to be formed legally in exchange for establishing some reserved seats representing Chinese mainland provinces in the new reformed National Congress. President Chiang Ching-kuo clearly demonstrated this position when he told the reporter from the Washington Post ten days after the establishment of DPP that he would lift martial law and the ban on new political parties on three conditions: that the opposition camp would openly recognize the ROC Constitution, oppose Communism, and abandon secessionism and the Taiwan Independence movement [18, p. 124]. All these conditions pointed to a Chinese national imagination. Under these guidelines, Taiwan's national political institutions should represent not only the people in Taiwan, but also all of China. By inference, any new design or arrangements of national political institutions without some forms of representatives of Chinese Provinces in the mainland would be considered as succumbing to the principles of Taiwan independence.

In short, the KMT regime tried to maintain the integrity of Chinese national imagination at all costs when facing great pressure for democratic reforms. This became the KMT regime's bottom line of democratic reforms in the late 1980s, which in reality constituted the biggest obstacle of Taiwan's democratization. This basic guideline for maintaining the Chinese national framework did not change before Chiang Ching-kuo's death in 1988, and even extended after his successor, Lee Teng-hui, took office and became the first Taiwanese ROC President.1

How, then, was the most important obstacle to Taiwan's democratization transition eventually overcome?

How the congressional reform was eventually accomplished

When the KMT regime's intention to establish some mainland province representatives in the new National Congress was revealed to the public in 1987, not only did the opposition camp immediately and strongly object, also did some Taiwanese elites within the KMT.2 For the first time, Taiwanese KMT elites openly took a different stand that opposed the Party's position on sensitive national political issues, such as

1 For instance, KMT's Secretary General Lee Huan ($&) openly stated that it was against the Constitution to allow all seats in the National Congress to be elected only by Taiwanese people. See the news coverage by Central Daily News, ((t^a^)) January 1, 1989, p.1.

2 The first Taiwanese KMT legislator to openly oppose such a reform scheme was Huang Chu-wen , who made an open statement in the Legislative Yuan in March 3, 1987, before the democratizing transition started. This kind of statement was also made by at least 20 other Taiwanese KMT legislators on more than 17 occasions in the formal congressional sessions over the next three years (see [26]).

the re-structuring of the National Congress. In contrast, all Mainlander legislators who made statements on the issue, regardless of their party affiliation, were in favor of establishing special seats representing the Mainland provinces [26, p. 125-127]. The Taiwanese KMT elites feared that such a reformative scheme was very likely to be interpreted as ethnic discrimination against Taiwanese by the KMT regime in the mind of general public. In other words, they began to worry that setting up special reserved seats for Mainlanders in the new National Congress would corroborate the DPP's accusation of KMT's ethnic political discrimination against Taiwanese. With the 1989 election for the supplementary seats of legislators approaching, some Taiwanese KMT elites warned their party leaders that Taiwanese people were becoming impatient with the slow progress of congressional reforms, which had been deterred by internal divergence on the "reserved seats for Chinese Provinces" issue within the ruling KMT along the ethnic cleavage. Their worry turned out to be well founded, as votes for KMT candidates decreased by more than 10% in the 1989 (60.1%) legislators' election compared to the 1986 election.

In a sense, the new ideal pattern of maintaining "different but equal" relations among ethnic groups, i.e., between Taiwanese and Mainlanders in this case, became widely accepted among all ethnic groups in Taiwan. As Taiwan's politics began to be re-interpreted and re-evaluated from a new ethnic-equality perspective after 1987, more and more of the Taiwanese populace began to develop a collective sense of being an ethnic minority in Taiwan. The ethnicized politics in Taiwan, to use Chang Mau-kuei's term [2], paved the way for further development in the democratizing transition.

Although Lee Teng-hui succeeded Chiang Ching-kuo and became the first Taiwanese President, some conservative Mainlander KMT elites did not want him to serve another term as President. Lee felt threatened by his constituency, the aging National Assembly controlled by the Mainlanders during the 1990 Presidential election. Even though he eventually won the presidential election running on the KMT ticket, he decided to take a different approach to congressional reform. The internal power strife between "mainstream" and "non-mainstream" factions in the KMT before the 1990 Presidential election was evidently a political cleavage along the ethnic division between Taiwanese and Mainlanders. The victory of Lee's mainstream faction in the 1990 election triggered reactionary responses by some Mainlanders elites within the KMT. Besides seeking the support of Taiwanese elites in the KMT, Lee appealed for the support of DPP elites and the Taiwanese public to fight against aging Mainlander congressional members and conservative factions in the KMT [18]. Lee's appeal was articulated on an ethnic ground when he claimed that he, as a Taiwanese President, was being coerced or bullied by Mainlander KMT elites. In a sense, Lee was appropriating the Taiwanese ethnic minority discourse, which the opposition camp and DPP had developed for a long time before this, to engage in the power struggle within the KMT. Given its high visibility and the apparently unjust nature of existing institutional arrangements

that favored Mainlanders' over-representation in the National Congress, congressional reforms became an easy first choice.

Most of the political process between the elite actions and interaction, as I just stated, has been described in more detail in political scientists' accounts of Taiwan's democratization transition. The main problem in the existing account is that they took ethnic consciousness among the Taiwanese populace for granted by treating it as exogenous and, most likely, constant factors in their political-process explanations of Taiwan's democratization transition. They assumed that the sense of ethnic inequality, as advocated by the Taiwanese opposition leader, was already widely shared among the Taiwanese populace, and that what was missing was cooperation between elites across political camps. The two assumptions were in fact related: because they were constant, rather than variable, we do not need to pay too much attention to them when trying to explain changes, and hence, they have been treated as exogenous factors in existing explanations.

The two assumptions, however, are not consistent with what actually happened. If most Taiwanese of the populace still had not developed an ethnic minority consciousness, as is shown in the analysis of the 1984 Taiwan Social Change Survey data in Table 1, how could President Lee Teng-hui have appealed to them on an ethnic ground, successfully bringing them into the political arena to overpower the resistance of conservative Mainlander elites within the KMT? How could Lee, who had never openly made this kind of statement before 1990, suddenly gain the populace's support for this cause if most of them were not even convinced of Taiwanese' ethnically unjust treatment by the KMT regime?

The fact that Taiwanese KMT elites dared to openly oppose their own party's proposition for establishing special reserved seats for Mainlanders in the name of representing their provinces in China in 1987 indicated a drastic change of such a consciousness among their constituency. They felt pressure from their supporters and tried to convey these changes to the party leadership, who were also engaged in internal strife over the same issue on their own. How can we be sure, however, about the changes on the part of the general populace that were so crucial to explaining the democratic transition?

A survey conducted in 1994 confirmed a changing pattern of ethnic consciousness among the Taiwanese. As can be seen in Table 2, in 1994, most Taiwanese (Holo and Hakka) thought that Mainlanders have more political influence than their own ethnic groups. More than two-thirds of the Holo and half of the Hakka interviewees thought that Mainlanders had more political influence over Taiwanese Holo; in comparison, only of 13.4% Holo and 24.8% of Hakka believed that Taiwanese Holo were more powerful than Mainlanders. The result for comparing the Mainlanders' and Taiwanese Hakka's relative political influence was even more striking: More than 75% of Taiwanese believed that Mainlanders were more powerful than the Hakka, and only 7% believed otherwise.

Table 2. Evaluation of Political Influence among Different Groups by Ethnic Groups,

1994 Social Image Survey

Ethnic Groups Political Power of Mainlanders Compared to Taiwanese-Holos Total

Less Same More

Holo 59 (13.4%) 90 (20.5%) 291 (66.1%) 440 [39.3%]

Hakka 82 (24.8%) 74 (22.4%) 175 (52.9%) 331 [29.6%]

Mainlanders 120 (38.5%) 85 (27.2%) 107 (34.3%) 312 [27.9%]

Aborigines 12 (32.4%) 15 (40.5%) 10 (27.0%) 37 [3.3%]

Total 273 (24.4%) 264 (23.6%) 583 (52.1%) 1120 100.0%

Pearson Chi-Squares = 96.600, DF = 6, p < .000 Source: Taiwan Social Image Survey, 1994 ( ): Row Percentage ; [ ]: Column Percentage

Political Power of Mainlanders Compared to Taiwanese-Hakka Total

Less Same More

Holo 24 (6.1%) 73 (18.4%) 299 (75.5%) 396 [38.0%]

Hakka 24 (7.3%) 53 (16.0%) 254 (76.7%) 331 [31.7%]

Mainlanders 43 (15.4%) %) % CO CO (2 %) 13 (6 %] 26 [2

Aborigines 4 (10.8%) 17 (45.9%) 16 (43.2%) %] [3

Total 95 (9.1%) 201 (19.3%) 747 (71.6%) 1043 100.0%

Pearson Chi-Squares = 42.133, DF = 6, p < .000 Source: Taiwan Social Image Survey, 1994 ( ): Row Percentage ; [ ]: Column Percentage

This was a significant change from the result of the 1984 survey, which indicated that most Taiwanese were still not conscious of their ethnic minority status back then. By the mid-1990s, after the popularized debates on ethnic political issues and the gradual emergence of a new ethnic concept, every ethnic group in Taiwan believed that they were minorities in some way and demanded to be treated equally by the government. They applied the same principle of demanding "different but equal" proposed by the opposition camp when it challenged the KMT regime to make the claim.

The changing pattern of ethnic consciousness among the Taiwanese was a result of real ethnic competition between Taiwanese and Mainlanders that erupted during the 1987 debate. This proved to be one of the last straws for overcoming the most important obstacles and triggering an unimaginable change: a new congress made entirely of delegates elected by a populace in Taiwan and no reserved seats for Mainlanders. The other part of the story was that rising ethnic consciousness among young Mainlanders also contributed to this transition in a paradoxical way. The 1987 debate on ethnic issues started by the young Mainlanders elites was in fact an intentional action of political mobilization to enhance ethnic consciousness and ethnic solidarity among Mainlanders. The collective efforts actually paid off in the 1989 election of supplementary seats of Legislative Yuan when Mainlander candidates won 32 of the 101 seats (31.6%). The electoral success removed the last obstacle in front of implementing the re-election of all congressional seats: that Mainlanders demanded special reserved seats representing Chinese provinces in the new congress because they worried that Mainlanders could not win a national election in Taiwan. After the most difficult obstacle was removed, the rest of the reforms in Taiwan's democratization gradually unfolded.

Conclusions

In this paper, I propose that the current political process model's account of Taiwan's democratic transition needs to be re-examined to identify the "critical change" and to re-evaluate the role of ethnic politics issues for a better explanation of the change, and a better understanding of what happened afterward, especially the intertwining of ethnicity, democratization, and national identity disputes. Given the symbolic significance of maintaining a national political institution representing all of China, the KMT regime was very reserved about allowing a new congress without special seats representing Chinese provinces. The congressional reforms thus became the most difficult ones to negotiate and to achieve during the democratic transition. Eventually, it was the new concept of evaluating ethnic equality under a new Taiwanese national framework which defined the old arrangement of national congress as discriminatory against Taiwanese that contributed to the unthinkable breakthrough. I have also shown that the widespread rising ethnic minority consciousness among the Taiwanese populace during late-1980s to early-1990s was the overlooked factor in existing explanations of Taiwan's democratic transition.

This finding also implied that the exact nature of the impact of the "ethnicity issue" on Taiwan's democratic transition needs to be reconsidered. This issue was not just disputed inter-ethnically between Taiwanese and Mainlanders, but also intra-ethnically among the Taiwanese. The fact that ethnic Taiwanese as a group, the numerical ethnic majority in Taiwan, has been, and still are, highly divided in national identity, the degree of ethnic minority consciousness and political party affiliations allows ethnic political competition to develop

despite the highly skewed distribution of the ethnic population in Taiwan, and hence constituted the major challenge for its democratic transition and democratic consolidation afterwards.

Contrary to the common statement about the detrimental effects of ethnic dispute or conflict on social cohesion, the case of Taiwan's ethnic politics development reveals a different possibility. The ethnic concept that began to become popular in Taiwan in 1987 was actually developed to counteract the racist ideology in the disguise of the Chinese nationalist doctrine. For a long period of time, Chinese national imagination was utilized by the KMT regime to justify its exclusion of Taiwanese from fair participation in national political institutions and its implementation of an assimilation policy that imposed a national high culture on the Taiwanese at the expense of Taiwanese local culture. Taiwanese, however, were not the only victim in this political and cultural arrangement. Mainlander youths also suffered when the KMT regime tried to placate the Taiwanese by promoting Taiwanese youths and open more national political positions to election. Mainlander youths also felt that they had been discriminated against by many Taiwanese employers who stipulated "Taiwanese only" in the personnel advertisements in the newspaper [26]. They therefore developed a minority ethnic consciousness across Mainlanders of different provincial backgrounds. The result of such implicit ethnic-exclusion policies was very harmful to social solidarity in Taiwan and yet hard to change given its nationalistic camouflage. When the ethnicity concept was developed in Taiwan, it took the form of ethnic pluralism and demanded a new pattern of "different but equal" relations among ethnic groups, as opposed to the previous ideal of ethnic assimilation. The wide acceptance of this new concept among the general public later became the critical factor in bringing about the most important and yet difficult reform in Taiwan's democratization in the 1991 - 1992 period. The positive impact of ethnic issues on Taiwan's democratization transition, however, was largely ignored in the existing explanation.

It should be noted that ethnic consciousness by nature is typically developed among minority groups in pursuit of fair or equal treatment. Such a political consciousness may inevitably lead to some form of conflict if the ethnic majority group refuses to grant equal treatment to minority. The cause of "ethnic conflicts," however, should not be attributed to ethnic minority who merely seeking to be treated equally like other groups in the society. The real cause of such conflicts is the maltreatment of the ethnic minority by the ethnic majority, usually in some disguise forms of racist ideology, which can be defined by the practice of classification, hierarchy, and exclusion when dealing with intergroup relations [10]. The true enemy of social harmony or solidarity in a democratic society, therefore, is not "ethnic consciousness" in the strict sense of the term, but rather the true "racist ideology" behind many forms of rationale that in effect exclude certain groups from being treated equally.

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