Is Lai going down Tsai or Chen’s footsteps?
The diplomatic Tsai Ing-wen started a new era for the DPP. Is her successor Lai Ching-te going to resemble her more or is a throwback to a less predictable dynamic possible?
The thing that you have to know about Mark Simon is that he HATES the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). I know, because I worked for Mark once upon a time at Next Media Animation and he would go on big, rambling discourses about how he and HIS boss, the Hong Kong tycoon Jimmy Lai had yet another great conversation about how much the CCP sucked.
I feel like I have to establish these bona fides first because it’s a really easy out to dismiss anyone who is dishing out criticism to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for their part in the chaos both inside and outside the legislature in Taiwan right now as pro-China. Mark Simon might be many things. But pro-China is not one of them, and this is what he had to say in a recent tweet:
Simon continues: “As someone remarked at an event at CFR in DC the other day, Lai Ching-te is on his way to being the next Chen in the eyes of the US foreign policy establishment. It’s a DPP action on the streets and Lai certainly has some control,” said Simon of the protests that drew tens of thousands of people to the legislature to protest the supposed overreach of legislative reforms tortuously wending itself through a physically chaotic legislature right now.
“Lai Ching-te and the DPP can’t govern without bringing in the mob to stop a democratically elected legislature? Taiwan still have a judicial system?”
Simon wraps up his broadside with this warning:
Lai has the backing of the US, but it’s not a blank check. Didn’t Taiwan learn that under Chen?
What does that mean exactly?
The Troublemaker
If you know anything about disgraced former president Chen Shui-bian, it’s probably that US President George W. Bush allegedly called him a ‘troublemaker.’ The White House denied it, but the sobriquet stuck because many thought it considered apropos. Chen wasn’t just pro Taiwanese Independence, he was mercurial and provocative about it. He made many out-of-pocket moves that took Washington by surprise, trying to regain entry to the United Nations under the name “Taiwan,” for instance.
I spoke to a veteran American reporter who has been covering politics in Taiwan since before Tsai Ing-wen cast her magic spell. Back to a time when both the US official apparatus and the foreign press actually preferred the Kuomintang (KMT). We are going to go back in time to the time of the two Chen administrations, starting from 2000 and ending in 2008.
“The foreign press used to show a KMT/blue bias when the blues maintained a lot of interaction with them and seemed like the reasonable actors vis a vis Chen Shui-bian, whose presidency was a failure on many levels, and who was struggling to maintain good ties with the United States,” said the reporter, who is working in a different sector now and prefers to be off the record.
Chen was the first president face a divided government with an opposition-lead legislature and it hasn’t happened again until now with Lai’s presidency. His two terms were fractious and won his 2nd term unexpectedly and with the slimmest of margins. He left a nation divided and sent his party into the political wilderness while delivering the presidency to President Ma Ying-Jeou, who also served two terms.
The Panda-hugger and the Space-creator
If Chen was the trouble-maker, who were his successors?
It was under Ma that the reversal of public relations fortunes between the KMT and DPP happened. The KMT closed their Washington representative office in 2008, just as Ma won the presidency. Under Ma the KMT wound down its engagement with the US and doubled down on the turn to China. This created the brief “golden era” in cross-straits relations. “Panda-hugger” is about right.
2014’s Sunflower movement drew massive positive press attention to the DPP, but it wasn’t until President Tsai took office in 2016 that the reversal was complete. She made a “concerted” and “relentless” effort to reach out to the media and “pushed out the DPP’s preferred narratives” like a kind of diplomatic Marie Kondo disappearing whatever wasn’t sparking joy. In its place she put in her own magic formulation: Taiwan doesn’t need to declare independence, because it is already independent. That one sparked joy! Sounds like a space-creator to me.
Who will Lai be as president?
The mildness and cleverness of Tsai must have been a balm for Washington after the abrasive Chen and the allegiance-switching Ma. US-Taiwan relations reached an all-time high since the breaking of diplomatic ties.
Will we get Tsai 2.0 with Lai? It’s what he campaigned as, although I don’t know if it is possible for anyone to match her deft touch. As for Chen 2.0 as Mark Simon says some in Washington fear, is that a possibility?
Both Lai and Chen face divided government with he opposition in charge of the legislature. Both are pro-independence for Taiwan in their hearts, but under heavy pressure not to express that. And in the almost quarter century that separated the start of their terms, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have become a much more formidable foe. Lai seems more stable and deliberate than Chen, but he is under observation and the stakes are high. Maybe it’s unreasonable to ask for Tsai 2.0, but let’s hope Lai will act as the adult in the room and the steady pair of hands that Taiwan desperately needs for these dangerous years.
(As a footnote since I’m probably not going to talk about Chen on Taipology for a while: There were big rumors flying around in the countdown to the end of the Tsai administration that she was going to pardon President Chen, who was charged with corruption, on her way out. She in fact did not do that. I’m not going to go into the details of the charges but he was found guilty of at least some of them and already served a number of years in jail. If she had done that it would have helped Lai with one less hot potato.
Sometimes I wonder: what if instead of the dumb Iraq war George Bush just backed that crazy Chen Shui-bian’s bid for independence and made that his foreign adventure? Full deal: diplomatic recognition, entry to the UN, complete normalization. What could China have done about it then? I mean China’s GDP was US$1.2 trillion dollars back then and it’s US$17.96 trillion dollars in 2022. And it’s been building its military accordingly. It wouldn’t have been a fair fight if China even dared to try, although of course they had nuclear bombs as deterrence. But guess what? Those nukes haven’t gone anywhere. It’s just that their conventional warfare capabilities are also much stronger now. But all this is idle speculation.)
The thought experiment at the end is interesting. 20 years go, China was much weaker. Because it’s much weaker, there is no point in pissing her off so badly, at the time when America’s foreign policy attention was squarely focused on the Middle East. And it’s not as if China was intentionally creating troubles for the US then, like what Al Qaeda or Iran did. Mistreating a major, but still very weak party is like a billionaire mistreating a poorer relative from the countryside. It’s just not so gentlemanly. Now, China is much stronger. Because it’s too strong, the attention is shifted this way. I’d argue it’s precisely because, and only because of the relative strength differential that determines how US would treat Taiwan in relation to China.
The difference between the A-Bian and Lai eras is primarily twofold: 1) The maturity of the DPP as a political force - Chen was a rookie, Lai is seasoned and has Bi-Khim as his deputy; and 2) The US business community is no longer so keen to access the Chinese consumer market. In 2000-2008, Chen was desperate to pull US attention back to Taiwan’s strategic value against China. At the time, Taiwan’s economy was being hollowed out as factories and foreign investors flooded across the Strait. He miscalculated and overreached, making Ma Ying-jeou seem like the mature realist. Tsai had no choice but to pull the DPP back from the edge. Today, it is a different story. US business is looking to diversify away from China and the US administration sees Taiwan (not just TSMC) as a strategic asset once again. Hsiao has everyone in Washington on speed dial, so what Lai says is much more carefully calibrated for the intended audience than Chen could have ever imagined. I think every word of that inauguration speech was chosen with the aim of gently testing American public support, without pushing any panic buttons. Look at the US reaction so far and it’s obvious he succeeded. Taiwan is back to being the way Americans always thought of it before China joined the WTO: a plucky little island standing firm against the big bad Communist aggressor.
Lai is not likely to push overtly for status change, but he is almost certainly going to push back against the One China narrative that Beijing insists upon, and he is surely going to paint the KMT as sellouts who can’t be trusted in Washington. The KMT/TPP, meanwhile, is completely out of touch and will almost certainly hand Lai a second term if they carry on this way.