To what extent is democracy "inevitable" to Taiwan's
sociopolitical environment? Just how likely is the
prospect of a democratized Chinese mainland? Two
recent books attempt some surprising answers.
Taiwan--its people and their rulers--have welcomed foreign scholars for at least half a century. Three streams of overseas academic inquirers have merged with local scholars and professional journalists to help others understand social developments among Chinese-speaking peoples. The first stream of talent from abroad consisted mostly of young stu dents learning Mandarin Chinese. The Cold War had closed off the Chinese mainland, but Taiwan remained hospitable to a generation of language-studying visitors from the United States and Europe, and from throughout the Pacific area. The relative openness of Taiwan compared with the mainland reflected the significant differences between the authoritarian ism of the one and the totalitarianism of the other.
As authoritarian rule began to wane and signs of democratic counter-tendencies began to occur, Taiwan became a site for tracking trends and conditions of transition to political pluralism. Some who had found their way to Taiwan for language study in the first stream of foreign visitors now returned for document collection and analysis, as well as for interviews with political and social elites, and soon thereafter for interviews with the general populace.
These two streams of training and observation preceded an even more important third infusion of Taiwan studies, which flowed from the recognition both within and without Taiwan of the significance of emergent democratic practices and institutions. The significance of democratic stirrings in Taiwan was twofold. One was that they contradicted expecta tions that Asian cultures, especially those heavily influenced by Confucian traditions, could support democratic practices. A second was the insight--some might say faith--of certain leaders as well as scholars that a successful nurturing of democratic processes in Taiwan could provide a bridge over the great divide between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. Opinions of whether this bridge would promote increased unity between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait or encourage peaceful resolution of differences, or both, varied among leaders and scholars. In any event, "the democracy card," as it came to be called, occupied the attention of an increasing number of foreign scholars in the third stream of overseas visitors.
Among exemplars of democratic scholars are Linda Chao and Ramon H. Myers of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (The First Chinese Democracy: Political Life in the Republic of China on Taiwan , Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), and Bruce J. Dickson of George Washington University ( Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties , Clarendon Press, 1997). Their research had been underway for nearly a decade, during which publication of articles and presentation of first findings circulated widely among other scholars of Taiwan. Indeed, so well known and well regarded are the writings of Chao, Myers and Dickson that some readers may be tempted to take for granted their considered observations on Taiwan's democratic trajectory and on the prospects for a similar course of events in the People's Republic of China.
Taking for granted democratic developments in Taiwan, much less extrapolating them to the PRC, would not comport with the facts as organized by Chao-Myers and Dickson. Their books offer varied approaches to similar conclusions--sobering, bracing conclusions for friends of democracy and advocates of peace in the Strait of Taiwan. For example, Chao and Myers: the coming of democracy to Taiwan was not inevitable; and Dickson: the coming of democracy to the PRC through the agency of the Chinese Communist Party ( CCP) is unlikely.
That a successful transition to democracy was not inevitable becomes apparent as Chao and Myers narrate partici pants and their activities during decisive choice points, indeed, a series of choice points. They tell the story with verve but without need for drama: the events were often dramatic enough without embellishment. They were also fast paced, with one important turning point following another, especially from 1986 to 1991. At any of several crossroads, the story line might have taken a different and contradictory path.
What if Chiang Kai-shek had not undertaken a reorganization of the Kuomintang ( KMT) after moving to Taiwan? What if Chiang Ching-kuo had not shown determination to change course in the mid-eighties, and what had he died sooner? What if Lee Teng-hui had in fact lacked the political skills many assumed he lacked?
Discretion among KMT leaders did not account for all the contingencies to be recounted. What if the native Taiwanese leadership, especially in the new Democratic Progressive Party ( DPP), had been overcome by hate rather than hope? What if they had not participated in political events they had had no hand in designing (e.g., local elections and the 1990 National Affairs Conference) and that to many among them seemed manipulated to thwart their ambitions for political power?
These rhetorical questions illustrate several decisive occasions in Taiwan's democratic development whose outcomes and effects could not be predicted with confidence. "Democracy," conclude Chao and Myers, "had been discussed in Taiwan as early as the 1950s, but replacing authoritarian rule with democracy was never inevitable."
I have referred to the rapid pace of events in Taiwan's transition to democratic institutions. Chao and Myers's narra tive takes the reader from one narrow victory for democratic innovation to another, particularly after Chiang Ching-kuo's death and Lee's succession to the presidency--street demonstrations, uncommon confrontations of the new president from within his own party, and rowdiness in the National Assembly, to mention a few. Perhaps it is worth hypothesizing that the rapidity of challenges, especially those successfully mounted, gave leaders rare experience in crisis management which ultimately assured not only transition to but consolidation of democratic practices and institutions. Advocates of gradualism, take note.
Still, if democratizing Taiwan was not a sure outcome of the prevailing social and political processes, is democratiz ing the PRC any more or less probable? Bruce Dickson compares the fortunes of the KMT in Taiwan with those of the CCP on the mainland. Although one is communist and the other is emphatically not, the two parties shared much in common organizationally. As is well known, seventy years ago Soviet advisers taught leaders of both parties about how to mobilize their members and propagandize the masses.
Dickson covers some of the same ground that Chao and Myers write about, especially Chiang Kai-shek's initiatives to revive the KMT after leaving the mainland and Chiang Ching-kuo's preparation to modify party rule and lift martial law before his death. Although Chao and Myers enjoyed more intimate access to party archives and to high-lever personages, Dickson's account from public documents and his interviews produce similar conclusions about the extent of the KMT's powers (authoritarian, not totalitarian), its responsiveness to electoral experience, and its reading and reinterpretation of the international context in which Taiwan operated.
If we acknowledge that Taiwan's hospitality to scholarship, from both Taiwanese and Chinese scholars as well as from those abroad, makes the results of Chao and Myers and Dickson more valid than anything comparable about the mainland, Dickson especially is not bereft of evidence about the PRC. Not only Taiwan-based academicians have moni tored the PRC, but scholars in Hong Kong kept a close lookout throughout the Cold War. And Dickson consulted such authorities.
On the basis of a broadly cast net of evidence, Dickson concludes that the weight and direction of key factors differ between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. His model of "adaptation" as a process favoring democratization requires political elites to tolerate some competition among themselves, to receive if not welcome "feedback" from the people they rule (e.g., through elections), and to situate themselves in an environment they can interpret as not unfriendly. The CCP institutionalizes concealment rather than clarification of differences. The government as well as the party make shams of the few elections they tolerate, as in choosing local delegates to the National People's Congress and in selecting members of the unofficial, non-governmental villagers' committees. The latter have drawn high hopes if not high approvals from streams of foreign guests in a period when Western diplomats have sought to engage rather than confront mainland China in discussing important differences and disagreements.
Notwithstanding the facade of local and villager elections, along with other efforts to cultivate a more benign rela tionship with the United States and other major nations, Beijing's leaders frequently define their environment as hostile. In so doing, they deny themselves one of the conditions for adapting to change and thus leave theorists such as Dickson discouraged about the prospects for Chinese democracy. Discouraged certainly about initiatives from the CCP. "Democratizing reforms," Dickson avers, "are unlikely to come under the sponsorship of the CCP; instead, they are likely to come at its expense."
If democracy was at no time inevitable in Taiwan, what are the prospects for its maintenance now that it is being established? Is duration as problematic as was transition? Is perpetuation contingent on some of the same conditions as those that favored democratic initiatives?
In the division of labor shared among a large number of democracy scholars and theorists, these questions were left to others by Chao and Myers and Dickson. While they provided solid understanding of developments in Taiwan and main land China, colleagues elsewhere attended to more extensive if less intensive analyses of trends and conditions among large numbers of democratic polities. About the time Taiwan was holding one of its critical elections (the 1989 contests for the Legislative Yuan and the National Assembly), Robert A. Dahl published his magisterial Democracy and Its Critics. Among his findings is that democracies that survive twenty years rarely regress.
Depending on when one dates the founding of democratic institutions in Taiwan, surely its polity may be said to be near the halfway point. If we note again the rapidity with which elites and non-elites of Taiwan have moved through rounds of elections and rounds of constitutional reforms, we may credit the island with accelerated development. The twenty-year rule may be a rule undergirded more by experience than time, in which case Taiwan's fast clock is promising.
Chao and Myers particularly note parallel progress in Taiwan's economic circumstances, indeed, suggesting that increased wealth facilitated increased power sharing. We need not debate cause-and-effect relations between wealth and democracy, but we should not overlook the well-established idea that no democratic polity with more than US$6,000 per capita income has yet failed.
Taiwan's economy long ago crossed this threshold (per capita income has been over US$10,000 since 1994), and thereby added insurance if not a guarantee to the duration of its democratic institutions. Still, experience with political democracy and wealth to sustain that experience, however important, constitute only part of the total context that supports or challenges a democratic polity. Surely mainland China is the big uncertainty in the future of Taiwan's democracy. Beijing's leaders have the power to terminate the Taiwan experience. They have the wealth to bankrupt it. They possess the skills and knowledge of how to diminish both the power and wealth of the island. They have shown that bonds among compatriots are weaker than their elite demands for power and deference. They have also demonstrated that the respect of world opinion matters less to them than does holding on to their powers and preferments.
That mainland China could threaten Taiwan's democracy is not news. Are there novel circumstances, however, under which Beijing's leaders would find it in their interests to continue to tolerate for an indefinite period the democratic institutions and practices of more than twenty million people one hundred miles distant? Such a question is of a different kind from those pursued by Chao and Myers and by Dickson, but it is suggested by their provocative clarifications of the trends and conditions of democratic innovations and consolidations.
On behalf of all foreign scholars, they have partially repaid the hospitality of Taiwan's leaders and people to more than a generation of democracy observers. In both indebtedness and repayment, many members of the overseas academic community have joined with Taiwanese and Chinese democracy scholars to form an enlarged multinational, multiethnic community committed to similar values. Surely among all this talent lie the resources to clarify further the goals, trends and conditions of cross-strait tolerance, and then to invent the alternatives that will increase the probability of the peace we associate with such tolerance.
James A. Robinson is Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, Florida. He was formerly president of that institution.
Copyright (c) 1999 by James A. Robinson.