Taiwan's faltering democracy

The stakes for renewing good governance in Taiwan are high.

from the July 2, 2007 edition

Page 2 of 2

Page 1 | 2

One major casualty of this breakdown has been a more engaged policy toward China, which is Taiwan's No. 1 trading partner. Yet in the emotional disputes over national identity, encouraged by an irresponsible news media, it is almost impossible for government officials to be seen as favoring conciliatory policies toward China without being seen as anti-Taiwan, and vice versa. Under such circumstances, public policy debates get derailed and creative initiatives are squelched.

"For the great majority of Taiwan's electorate, the mechanisms of democratic accountability have failed," wrote political scientist Chu Yun-han of Taiwan's Academia Sinica in a recent paper.

He further concluded that the erosion of democratic legitimacy has large implications for China itself, where liberal intellectuals and senior leaders closely follow Taiwan's affairs. If Taiwan's democracy founders, it would discourage reformers in China who look to Taiwan to demonstrate the advantages of an open and competitive political system.

It's not clear what the candidates in next year's presidential election would or could do about all this. Ma Ying-jeou, the mild-mannered, Harvard-educated former mayor of Taipei, is the main hope for reviving the ruling prospects of the Nationalists. His remedy for the legislative deadlock is to appoint a premier from the majority party, even if it's not his own. The DPP's Frank Hsieh, the Japanese-educated former premier and city of Kaohsiung's mayor, says he would form a coalition to win support for his government from a majority of lawmakers, something that Chen has refused to do.

But the larger crisis of governance that worries many of Taiwan's citizens will require stronger remedies than this. The campaign gives Messrs. Ma and Hsieh the opportunity to show voters the right skill set of "political entrepreneurship" and commitment to democratic values that can restore the bright promise of the first democracy in an ethnic Chinese society. People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are watching and waiting.

• Julian Baum is a former Taiwan correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review.

1 | Page 2