Why Ma Won the Elections and What's Next for Taiwan and China

1CommentsJoin

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.

Reading List

What to Read on Taiwanese Politics

Daniel Lynch

An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on Taiwanese politics.

In presidential elections this weekend, Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan's incumbent president from the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalist Party, decisively defeated Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). With about 52 percent of the vote (compared to Tsai's 45.6 percent and the third-party candidate James Soong's 2.8 percent), Ma will be able to govern with a clear majority of popular support. His margin of victory was far higher than most opinion polls had predicted. Many Soong supporters seem to have decided in recent days that by voting for their preferred candidate, who is almost politically identical to Ma, they might hand Tsai the victory.

During the campaign, most observers insisted that the election was not about cross-strait relations but about socio-economic issues, including rapid economic growth amid worsening inequality, reduced career opportunities for recent college graduates, and unaffordable housing costs. In fact, socio-economic issues are inseparable from cross-strait issues. Ma ran on his record of improving ties between China and Taiwan, claiming that friendship meant stability and prosperity and that a reversion to DPP rule would throw Taiwan back into the dark days of the mid-2000s, when DPP President Chen Shui-bian's avowedly Taiwan-centric policies blocked negotiations even on direct passenger plane flights across the Taiwan Strait. Tsai, no protectionist or isolationist herself, promised not to roll back cooperation with China for the same reason. Her main criticism of Ma was that he is naive about China. According to her, issues of further integration -- such as allowing Chinese professionals and white-collar workers to take jobs in Taiwan -- should be approached cautiously.

For their part, voters seem to have accepted Ma's contention that reducing cross-strait tensions improves the country's economic well-being. Indeed, more than ever, Taiwan's economy is dependent on China's. This is partly a result of market dynamics (Taiwanese capital flows across the Taiwan Strait in search of lower production costs) and partly a result of the KMT and Chinese Communist Party's efforts to facilitate integration. By the end of 2011, some 80,000 Taiwanese firms had invested up to $200 billion in mainland factories, research and development centers, stores, and restaurants. And annual trade between the two sides exceeded $150 billion. Meanwhile, out of a total population of 23 million, one million or more Taiwanese live in China. Directly or indirectly, the majority of Taiwanese households depend on Chinese economic dynamism for their livelihood.

These are the dynamics that had helped Ma win a landslide victory in the 2008 Taiwan elections to begin with. He had made the campaign promise to pursue something like a Taiwanese-Chinese common market. He delivered on this pledge in 2010 by signing with Beijing the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), under which the two sides agreed to slash tariffs on a wide variety of goods and services. By December 2011, 16.1 percent of Taiwanese goods exported to China and 10.5 percent of Chinese goods exported to Taiwan were already tariffed at preferential rates. Important services were also covered under ECFA's "early harvest" provisions.

Ma was able to achieve his ECFA breakthrough because he was willing to recognize the so-called 1992 consensus. This is the name given later to an agreement between his party and the Chinese Communist Party under which both sides acknowledged that there is only one China. Taiwan belongs to it, but each side could define "China" as it wished. Beijing could thus claim that the one China is the People's Republic (PRC), while Taipei could claim it is the Republic of China (ROC), Taiwan's official name. Beijing has long set acknowledgement of the 1992 consensus as a non-negotiable precondition for stable cross-strait relations.

The DPP, however, has consistently rejected the 1992 consensus, including under Chen's 2000-8 administration. The DPP believes that acknowledging the consensus is unacceptable for two reasons: First, if the world has only one China, that one China will inevitably be the PRC, and consequently, acknowledging the consensus means denying the existence of the ROC; and second, Taiwan was still an authoritarian state in 1992, when the KMT negotiated the consensus. Any agreement with such profound implications for Taiwan's future should have been approved by voters in a referendum or through other democratic procedures.

Most KMT figures privately acknowledge the absurdity of the claim that any one China could be the ROC. They explain that the 1992 consensus should be understood not in literal terms but rather as a kind of mantra the Taiwanese government must chant in order to have good relations with China -- a harmless ritual that allows Taiwan to proceed pragmatically with the all-important business of facilitating cross-strait economic and sociocultural ties. Most voters evidently accept the KMT's interpretation.

DPP leaders, in contrast, argue that far from being innocuous, the consensus is a dangerous formulation that threatens to push Taiwan down the path of becoming a Chinese "special administrative region" like Hong Kong. In domestic polls, some 75-80 percent of respondents consistently reject the notion that Taiwan should ever accept a status resembling that of Hong Kong. But the DPP has been unable to capitalize on this sentiment, because it has yet to produce a workable replacement for the consensus concept: a pithy summation characterizing cross-strait relations that would be acceptable both to Beijing and to Taiwanese worried about securing Taiwan's de facto, or even de jure, independence.