The KMT was not only saddled with a record of dishonest politics but as well with a lackluster candidate, who has been described as “a wooden patrician who looks like he never took a bus or walked on the streets in his life.” In the election Soong came in second behind Chen, leaving Lien to come in a poor third.

Taiwan’s Tenuous Connections to China

Chinese civilization is of course quite ancient; it is possibly the oldest civilization in continuous existence. But Taiwan’s association with China is relatively recent. Dutch maritime traders established a colony on Taiwan in the seventeenth century. Chinese colonization followed thereafter. The Chinese emperor claimed the island in 1684. During the next two centuries the Chinese population grew to outnumber the original inhabitants, a people related to the Filipinos. However, the Chinese monarchy during this period was weak and unable to exercise much control of an island one hundred miles from mainland China (about as far from China as Cuba is from the United States).

The Pacific Rim was in reality dominated by the European trading companies, especially as the imperialist powers moved toward dividing the world among themselves, a fact accomplished in the second half of the nineteenth century. Following the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Taiwan became a possession of the Empire of Japan. Over the course of half a century the Japanese made a deep impact on the economy and culture of Taiwan. Japanese influence can be seen in Taiwan’s architecture and even heard in colloquial speech to this day.

After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Taiwan was “restored” to the Republic of China, which was in a state of civil war between the corrupt KMT government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist Party–led People’s Liberation Army (PLA). For the first time in history the central government of China, such as it was under Chiang, attempted to impose its will on the people of Taiwan. Before two years had elapsed the Taiwanese people, though ethnically Chinese, could no longer tolerate rule by the Republic of China.

On February 28, 1947, KMT troops attempted to arrest a poor woman who made her living selling cigarettes on the streets of Taipei. When a man came to her defense, they killed him, in an incident similar to recent events in New York City. The people rose up in protest, and the KMT governor, Chen Yi, ordered his troops to fire on the unarmed Taiwanese. The soldiers went on a rampage for several days, and when it was over about 18,000 Taiwanese had been killed, according to the government’s own admission. There are estimates that the death toll was closer to 40,000 — on an island whose population was only about six million at that time. “2-28” to this day has a special meaning to the Taiwanese people, similar to “Trail of Tears” to the Cherokees of Oklahoma or “Deir Yassin” to the Palestinian Arabs. The native Taiwanese people have neither forgiven nor forgotten what the Chinese Mainlander forces did 53 years ago.

The people of the mainland, of course, had themselves suffered at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek and his corrupt Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. Furthermore, the Nationalists had done nothing to rally the Chinese people against the Japanese occupiers during World War II. The PLA did the actual fighting, and thousands of Chinese peasants joined it in order to drive the Japanese out and reclaim their country. These battle-hardened guerrilla fighters routed the KMT forces; Chiang Kai-shek and his associates fled to Taiwan, where they established themselves as a government on December 8, 1949. Chiang imposed martial law. The parliament which had been elected on the mainland in 1947 (the election was for the most part rigged) was transported wholesale to Taiwan. Those members who had belonged to opposition parties remained as window-dressing to give the Taiwanese government the appearance of democracy; in reality, there was a “yes” party and an “of course” party.

The Formation of the Democratic Progressive Party and the KMT’s Concessions to Democracy

A new opposition movement began to develop in the 1970s, especially after Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975 and the succession of Chiang Ching-kuo, the Generalissimo’s son, to power. The new movement was known as “tang-wai,” meaning “outside the party.” Among the tang-wai activists were Lin Yi-hsiung, Annette Lu (now the vice president–elect), and Shih Ming-teh, all of whom later became founders of the Democratic Progressive Party. Shih later became chairman of the DPP; Lin is its current chairman. They participated in launching a monthly magazine called Formosa (for the island’s pre-1949 Portuguese name) and began organizing demonstrations for human rights and democracy.

In December 1979 a demonstration in the southern port city of Kaohsiung was attacked by troops, provoking a violent response. On December 13, 1979, Lu, Shih, and Chen Chu (now head of the DPP Social Services Bureau in Kaohsiung) were arrested at the home of Shih and his American-born wife, Linda Gail Arrigo. They were charged with sedition. Lin Yi-hsiung was arrested in the apartment below, where he lived with his wife, three daughters, and his mother. Other arrests followed in a widespread crackdown on the tang-wei movement. Two days later Arrigo was deported to the United States on orders of James Soong, at that time head of the Government Information Office.

Eight of the defendants were tried in a military court; thirty in a civilian court. Chen Shui-bian was one of ten defense attorneys for the military defendants; another member of the legal team was Frank Hsieh, the present DPP Mayor of Kaohsiung.

As the trial was beginning, agents of the KMT broke into the Lin Yi-hsiung’s apartment and stabbed to death his mother and his five-year-old twin daughters. His oldest child was seriously wounded but survived. Ironically — or perhaps intentionally — this crime was committed on February 28, 1980. To this day no one has ever been called to account for the crime. (In a similar act of political intimidation, a hit-and-run truck driver struck Chen Shui-bian’s wife Wu Shu-jen in November of 1984, leaving her a paraplegic.)

The Democratic Progressive Party was launched in September 1986; two years later Chiang Ching-kuo died, elevating Vice President Lee Teng-hui to the presidency. Lee is a native Taiwanese, not a Mainlander, and he recognized that Chiang’s dream of a military reconquest of China was no longer possible. The United States had recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1978 and broken diplomatic relations with Chiang’s “Republic of China.” However, during the 1960s and 1970s Taiwan had developed a vigorous export-oriented economy, and Lee was intelligent enough to realize that continuing trade with Japan and the West was the only hope for Taiwan’s bankers, shippers, and industrialists, who had become enormously rich in the post–World War II period.

It was clear in the waning years of the Cold War that the Cold War dictators had no future, as Nicaragua’s Tacho Somoza, the Shah of Iran, and Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines all fell from power. Even that bastion of Cold War anti-Communism, South Africa, was attempting to organize an orderly transition from apartheid to Black majority rule.

In 1990 Lee declared an amnesty for political prisoners. Shih Ming-teh was released from prison, and Linda Gail Arrigo was able to return to Taiwan. (They were divorced in 1995.) The DPP was legalized, and in 1992 Taiwan held its first free elections for parliament.

During the 1990s, the DPP continued to grow, winning many seats in the parliament (though not a majority). Chen Shui-bian was elected mayor of Taipei in 1994, and in 1997 the DPP won 12 of 20 municipal elections throughout the island.

The facts point to only one conclusion: Taiwan can be considered a province of China only by virtue of military force. It was governed from the mainland for only four years (1945–49) during the entire twentieth century, and rule by the Mainlander refugee elite from 1949 to 1988 was brutal and oppressive to the native Taiwanese majority. Taiwan’s economy and political life have developed independently of China’s. In reality Taiwan is an independent country in every way but legally. The only thing preventing the native Taiwanese majority from declaring formal independence is fear of military reprisal from the mainland.

The Presidential Election — Why Chen Won

Throughout the election campaign, polls indicated that the election would be close, and that the winner could not be predicted. The situation began to change in favor of the DPP in March. In a March 19 e-mail message to me and other friends in the U.S., Linda Gail Arrigo wrote:

This is an extremely important and pivotal point for Taiwan, and one that I scarcely dared to hope for. I don’t know how much time I have to write now, but at least I have been a peripheral participant in this. Chen Shui-Bian’s taking the presidency happened so fast at the end, the vote count came in two hours after the close of the polls, and he was only 2.5% (300,000 votes) ahead of the fascist candidate, James Soong, the Mainlander Government Information Officer who had me kicked out of Taiwan twenty years ago. And Chen won with only 39.3% of the vote.

 The big change began to develop on March 5 when Nobel Prize Laureate Lee Yuan-Tseh, head of the Academia Sinica (the major government research organization, like something holy), came out with a public lecture attacking “black gold,” meaning corruption and gangsters in government [not to be confused with crude oil — T.B.]. I was assigned to translate the speech by the Taiwan News, who also sponsored the lecture, among others. Then a few days later Lee Yuan-Tseh came out explicitly for Ah-Bian. Some industrialists came forward, too. The situation began to look hopeful. The KMT was inviting people to dinner by the thousands all throughout the island and handing out money, but the effect of that could not be predicted — though usually it bought them victory in the past.

 Obviously it was the fact that James Soong, the provincial governor groomed by President Lee Teng-hui, turned against the Taiwanized KMT and rallied the old Mainlander KMT (plus his own patronage network) for a showdown with them that gave Chen the in. Soong, who was just expelled from the KMT less than a year ago after he announced his independent candidacy, has a policy much closer to China (he is a Mainlander, of course), but he restyled himself as a “new Taiwanese” and “loving Taiwan.” In the last few days before the election he railed at the DPP for being corrupted by the KMT — as if he himself were lily white. This was already a few weeks after it was revealed that he gave his son money to buy five houses in California through private accounts milked from KMT campaign funds, although he had portrayed himself as poor as a church mouse, an honest bureaucrat.…

 Chen’s triumphant crowd was maybe 20,000. His last rally on Friday night was billed as something like 200,000, much more than the others. I was able to get into the press conference at which they announced their victory. So many of those up there were my comrades-in-arms twenty years ago. Annette Lu, now the Vice President, and Chen Chu, Chen Shui-Bian’s Social Service Director, were both arrested at my house in the 1979 crackdown.…

 In the middle of the night Pirate [nickname of Arrigo’s present husband — T.B.] and I went to the near-riot of Soong’s supporters at the KMT’s Central Party Headquarters, Mainlanders who feel they have been sold down the river by Lee Teng-hui — even though it was Soong’s split that caused Chen’s victory. Fortunately they didn’t recognize me, and told me lots of interesting things, like the KMT already knew two weeks ago that Lien wasn’t going to win, and sold off a large portion of party assets (i.e. passing them to private individuals at very low prices) to keep them from being taken by Chen or Soong. Now more than 24 hours later Soong’s people are still besieging the place, and are surrounded by riot police who are wisely standing off. It is indeed a shock to the Mainlanders to see the KMT fall, and strange to see them demonstrating like this. Are they trying to create a disturbance and give China an excuse to intervene? So far it is only a minor scene, actually, although it is in the center of the political geography.

 For the most part no one seems to think there will be a problem with an orderly transfer of power, but I think we can’t count our chickens until they’re hatched. The U.S. has made fairly strong statements to China, and [PRC Premier] Zhu Rongji will have to realize that his threats to Taiwan didn’t bring down the independence candidate (relatively speaking, since Chen has asserted he will not declare independence unless China attacks.)

Zhu Rongji made his threats within a week of the actual election, insinuating that if the DPP candidate won, China might invade militarily. In previous elections, such threats have succeeded in intimidating Taiwanese voters; this time the threats backfired, angering many voters into casting their ballots for Chen and Lu.

Political corruption was also a big issue in the Taiwanese election, with all the candidates pledging to clean it up — a campaign promise of the kind that American voters are all too familiar with. Chen Shui-bian attempted to clean up corruption as mayor of Taipei and made powerful enemies, leading to defeat in his 1998 reelection bid.

In reality, all the parties and candidates had some dirt on their hands. DPP Chairman Lin has criticized opportunism within his own party. He has written, “The most serious issue facing the DPP now is not how to take power, but how to ensure that it will remain aloof from the seductions of power and not disappoint the trust placed in it by the Taiwanese people.”

Challenges Facing the Capitalist Class — and the Workers

Taiwan is a small island with a population of about 22 million, not large by East Asian standards — but its economic clout is far out of proportion to its size. In the 1950s it received foreign aid from the United States. Today Taiwan is a foreign aid donor. Its per capita income is approximately $12,000 per year — nearly thirty times higher than per capita income in the so-called People’s Republic of China. Taiwan’s export-oriented economy during the late 1980s and 1990s shifted from garment/textile and children’s toys to heavy industry and high technology, and on the list of the United States’s trading partners it ranks seventh.

As China’s ruling bureaucrats have led the transition back to a capitalist economy from a centrally planned but bureaucratically mismanaged economy, they have encouraged foreign investment, and a great deal of it has come from Taiwan. Taiwan’s consistent trade surpluses have built up enormous quantities of capital — far more than can be profitably invested in such a small island. Consequently, Taiwan’s importance to the economy and politics of the Pacific Rim is far out of proportion to its size, population, and natural resources.

The cost of creating such a capitalist powerhouse has been high, however. The repressive Chiang (father and son) dictatorship allowed Taiwanese capitalists to create their industrial “miracle” without the distraction of pesky trade unions demanding fair wages and safe and healthy working conditions. If there is one thing that Deng Xiaoping’s heirs in Beijing have learned from the Asian post–World War II experience, it is that capitalism and democracy are in fact mutually antagonistic, not complementary. Out of the “Four Tigers of the Pacific” (South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore) only one — Hong Kong — has had a relatively free society, but it had that as a possession of the British crown. Today it has been reintegrated into the “People’s Republic,” and the future of democratic rights in Hong Kong is in serious doubt.

Since the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987 and the legalization of opposition parties under Lee Teng-hui’s administration, a free trade union movement has emerged, led by the Taiwan Labor Front. With the lowest unemployment rate (2.8%) on the continent, and a relatively high standard of living, class antagonisms in Taiwan remain somewhat below the surface. The militant strikes carried out by South Korean workers have had no parallel in Taiwan.

Though the DPP platform calls on the government to guarantee the right of workers to organize and strike, and additionally calls for wages to be pegged to the cost of living, working-class issues have not been a central feature of its election campaigns. That partly is due to economic growth, which not even the Asian downturn of the latter half of the 1990s interrupted. Additionally, because of popular association of Marxism with the bureaucratized and despotic Chinese Communist Party, socialist ideas have had a difficult time gaining a hearing within the Taiwanese working class, and the radical wing of the labor movement has been unable to take root.

Environmental Devastation

Another consequence of Taiwan’s industrial transformation has been the ecological devastation of the island. Air pollution in the city of Taipei is among the worst on the continent of Asia. Linda Gail Arrigo, who suffers from asthma, is no longer able to live within Taipei’s city limits and has become an activist in the Taiwan Green Party. In a joint report by the Taiwan Green Party and Green Formosa Front, she and T.J. Wu wrote:

According to environmental activists in Taiwan,…reckless industrial policy has brought Taiwan an uncontrolled disaster of gargantuan proportions, a quiet time bomb that may decimate the coming generation. It would seem that Taiwan could have learned from Japan’s Minamata Disease tragedy of the 1960s.

 Now that the list of producers of this chloride-production waste has been tallied up, it is found that seven Taiwan producers of chlorine by this process produced an estimated 130,000 tons in the 1970s and ’80s. The whereabouts of only about 10,000 tons is known for certain; the remaining 120,000 tons are unaccounted for.… There is little sign that Taiwan’s EPA has the will or the ability to deal with this and with the other toxic side-products of Taiwan’s rapid and largely unregulated industrial development.…[L]aws have been passed that inflict criminal punishment on producers, transporters, and landowners in cases of illegal toxic waste disposal, but it remains to be seen whether they will be enforced. The EPA has not taken on the task of educating the population to be wary for its own health and to participate in the tasks of discovery and resolution. As it is, Taiwan’s EPA in recent years has been busy fending off protests against government projects that involve building dams or destroying wetlands or covering up beaches and waterways with cement.

Whatever the DPP’s intentions, and regardless of what Chen’s administration does, his election has inspired the native Taiwanese people and given a new feeling of confidence to all on the island who are working for social justice. Trade unionists, environmentalists, and those working for Taiwan’s political independence will be stepping up their activity with a confidence that they can overcome intimidation and repression and ultimately win, as Chen and Lu have demonstrated in this election. And this is precisely what worries Jiang Zemin — and Bill Clinton.

Though in 1992 Clinton criticized then–President George Bush for his cozy relationship with the Chinese government in spite of its poor human rights record (only three years after the Tiananmen Square massacre), Clinton’s policy toward the PRC has not differed in any way from Bush’s. Clinton and those who are advising him understand what the PRC leaders understand: capitalism and democracy are mutually antagonistic in today’s world, especially on the continent of Asia. Big business makes bigger profits if authoritarian dictatorships like that of Lee Kuan-yew in Singapore or Chiang Kai-shek/Ching-kuo in pre-1988 Taiwan make sure that no troublesome trade unions or environmentalists get in the way.

And it is a sure bet that trade unions and environmentalists, along with those fighting for democratic rights and Taiwanese independence, are feeling the wind in their sails at this time. That wind can blow across the Taiwan Strait: if the Taiwanese democratic movement can recover from the crackdown following the Kaohsiung riot, surely the Chinese democratic movement can recover from Tiananmen.

Labor Should Support Self-Determination for Taiwan

Here in the United States — and in other countries as well, especially those trading in the Pacific Rim — the labor movement needs to demand that the will of the Taiwanese people be respected. We have to call on the Clinton administration to drop its “three no’s” policy — of no “two China policy,” no independence for Taiwan, and no membership for Taiwan in any organization for which statehood is a requirement. That concession to Beijing’s tyrants must stop now. And the same demand applies to those same capitalist wannabes in the PRC. Just as we demand that the Chinese government improve human rights and labor conditions within its borders, we should also demand that the mainland Chinese government stop its threats against Taiwan and allow the Taiwanese people full self-determination. The people of Taiwan have the right to decide between independence and reunification with China and to make the decision without guns to their heads.

Socialists unfortunately have for the most part understood the Taiwanese situation poorly over the years, seeing it as a conflict only between the KMT dictatorship and the Chinese People’s Republic — genuinely threatened by the United States — on the other. It is important to recognize that both stood for the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland — the KMT’s program was a conquest of the mainland to overthrow the People’s Republic and restore capitalism; the CCP demanded the reintegration of Taiwan into the PRC. The native Taiwanese, oppressed by the Mainlander elite and exploited by the financiers, both local and international, who were industrializing the island, were invisible to everyone beyond Taiwan’s shores. Their struggle for self-determination has never at any time posed a threat to the People’s Republic, nor does it today. Too often the CCP’s assertion that Taiwan had been stolen from China by the defeated KMT, with U.S. backing, was accepted without question by people on the left. The facts conclusively prove otherwise. It is time for the socialist movement to be the best fighter for the unconditional right of Taiwan’s people to be free and to determine their own future. A socialist program would be a powerful weapon for the Taiwanese working class in the fight for its rights, as would the international solidarity of militant workers throughout the world.

March 26, 2000