Contrasting Taiwan's political culture with that of China
陳清池

Taiwan's liberal democratic political culture has set it far apart from the autocratic, authoritarian political culture of China.

Let's take a look at China's political culture first. Even though the Chinese might perceive the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a modern state, historians such as Harvard Professor Philip Kuhn and University of Texas Professor Ross Terrill consider the PRC as an empire rather than a modern state. As a matter of fact, Terrill's 2003 book is appropriately titled The New Chinese Empire. China was for long an empire; and the Beijing government of today clearly has not relinquished all the modes of empire. According to Kuhn who published his Origins of the Modern Chinese State in 2002, in China "empire is still alive in some guise or other in the Chinese body politics and probably in the minds of many Chinese."

The relationship between the rulers and the ruled in China is indeed little different from that during China's imperial times. In spite of Mencius' view that only a government that respected the people was a just government, political legitimacy in China has never stemmed from sovereignty of the people. Regardless of its official name of People's Republic, popular sovereignty simply does not exist in China. Not only the Republic is not "of" the people, it is more "by" and "fo" the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) than "by and for" the people. The Chinese Communist rulers today look down upon the people, as did their imperial predecessors. Mao Zedong famously regarded the people as "poor and blank" and thus easy for the rulers to mold them in the way that Mao would see fit. Likewise, Jiang Zemin has justified CCP's rejecting democracy on the pretext that the Chinese people are poorly educated and thus far from being ready for it. Jiang apparently had conveniently ignored the fact that democracy prevails in India wherein its people are not necessarily bettered educated than the Chinese.

The Chinese government is not an elected one and will not be one in the foreseeable future. Stability and order are the primary concerns of the party state as they were of the empire of China’s past.

Terrill pointed out that the imperial rulers of China's past resorted to political method to sustain the myth of Chinese unity. In today's terms, according to Terrill, the myth is known as "One China." "The idea and ideal of One China" are "deeply embedded in the Chinese mind," Singapore's foreign minister, George Yeo, said recently. [See Michael Vatikiotic, "In Asia's Chinese Diaspora, Are Loyalties Divided?" International Herald tribune, 8/24/2005.] There is little doubt that today's Chinese leaders are even more determined to create a single national affiliation among its citizenry.

The words "freedom" and "equality" were virtually absent from Chinese political writings that have stressed "duties," "status" and "hierarchy" since the time of Confucius. It is no wonder that not only the Chinese government has rules and regulations for censoring the Chinese publications and electronic networks but has even compelled foreign IT networks to remove such western terms and concepts as "freedom" and "democracy." These terms are perceived as subversive to socio-political stability and order. This was the reason the Beijing government moved to brutally crush the college student protesters demanding democratic reform at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. For the same reason, Jiang Zemin and his successor are persecuting the Falungong followers in China and are spying on those abroad.

In contrast, Taiwan's political culture has evolved over the years to become liberal democratic, i.e. more western than Chinese. True, for decades in the post-WWII era Taiwan was under Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorial rule. Chiang was as much imbued with China's past imperial glory as Mao did. His Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was as Leninist as the CCP has been. Chiang Kai-shek had won power through the gun in the late 1920's. The KMT party-state was unable to move away from the Chinese authoritarian tradition because it had not come to power by the will of the people.

Having lost the Chinese Civil War to the Mao-led CCP in 1949, Chiang and his supporters ended up in exile in Taiwan. The people of Taiwan did not elect Chiang and his son and successor Chiang Ching-kuo. Even though the Chiangs had paid lip service to popular sovereignty, they did not embrace popular sovereignty. Both of them were nominated by the KMT, the ruling and only meaningful political party in Taiwan, and consequently their election as the president by the rubber-stamp National Assembly were automatic. It was only due to rapidly changing political situations, both in and out of Taiwan, that the KMT ultimately had to yield in the late 1980's. Chiang Ching-kuo wisely allowed the formation of an opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 1986 and lifted in 1987 the Martial Law that had been in existence since early 1950s.

Today in Taiwan, the people directly elect all representative officials ranging from township heads to the president. Popular sovereignty is widely embraced. One can also say, as Professor Lung-chih Chen does, that with the direct election of the president since 1996, Taiwan is now a new sovereign and independent nation. Chen called the institution of direct election of the president "effective self-determination." Two presidents have been elected this way. The election of Chen Shui-bian in 2000 and then again in 2004 are of particular significance on account of the fact that the voters rejected the candidates of the KMT that had been the ruling party of Taiwan for over half a century.

In this new nation Taiwan, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly and more are guaranteed. Taiwan is no longer a party state as it was under the two Chiangs. The island nation has a multiparty political system institutionalized in a pluralistic society. Uniformity is not encouraged as it used to during the KMT era; spoken languages other than the Mandarin are now also offered at school. Human rights and human dignity are respected. As a result, the US-based Freedom House has ranked Taiwan as one of the two or three freest nations in Asia while China is ranked as one of the least free. Taiwan's successful democracy is seen by China as "a monster," Philip Kuhn said in his recent Harvard talk on China's historical experience of "Empire and Nation."

It is crystal clear that the difference between Taiwan's political culture and that in China is like that between day and night. Not only the people of Taiwan value their freedoms and democracy but they should also be able to expect the freedom-loving people of the world to support their aspiration to remain free and independent. It is in this sense that the widening political and cultural divide between Taiwan and China is figuratively a protective strait in affording the people of Taiwan protection that the Strait of Taiwan has.

This is not to say that Taiwan does not need a military defense. On the contrary, as a sovereign independent nation, Taiwan's defense is on the shoulders of its people. Friendly nations such as the US and Japan will come to its aid only if they are convinced that the people of Taiwan are determined to defend what they have struggled to win over the past half century.