Taiwanese democracy catches on—in mainland China

THE presidential and parliamentary elections that Taiwan held on January 14th were unusual. No party was engulfed in scandal, as was the ruling party at the time in 2008. No candidate was shot at, as the incumbent was four years before that. China issued no dire warnings, as it did in 2000. Nor did it reinforce such warnings by lobbing missiles into the seas around Taiwan, as it did in 1996. Indeed, perhaps most striking this time round was the reaction the polls aroused in China. There, some saw President Ma Ying-jeou’s re-election in a peacefully contested race as evidence that democracy might one day have a chance in China too.

Taiwan’s elections might have created a new source of instability in Asia that neither America nor China was keen to face. America is in a presidential election year and China, too, will soon undergo a sweeping change of its leaders. Officials from both countries had hinted strongly at the outcome in Taiwan that they preferred: another four years of Mr Ma. He can be relied upon not to goad an untested new leadership in Beijing into an alarming display of military posturing of the kind it put on the mid-1990s, on the occasion of the island’s first democratic election for the presidency. In the event, Mr Ma won with nearly 52% of the vote, and his Kuomintang (KMT) held the legislature.

It was a relief to both China and America. At the same time the composure of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was also reassuring. Its candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, came a solid second, with nearly 46% of the vote. The DPP accepted defeat gracefully, unlike the KMT in 2004, when it took to the streets and courts to contest victory by the DPP incumbent, Chen Shui-bian. Ms Tsai, a bureaucrat turned politician, had hoped to become the island’s first woman president. She resigned the chairmanship of the DPP after her defeat. Yet she deserves credit for turning round the fortunes of a party that was thrown into disarray by Mr Ma’s victory in 2008, and by the shock of Mr Chen’s later conviction and prison sentence for gross corruption.

Mr Ma’s re-election suggests that many voters shared the fears of Chinese and American officials that Ms Tsai might revive Mr Chen’s provocative approach in dealing with the mainland. This involved vigorously asserting Taiwan’s separateness and resisting any initiatives that remotely smacked of “one China” embracing both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Yet strong support for Ms Tsai (who happens to be far less of a China-provoker than Mr Chen was) also suggested that some Taiwanese are uneasy about the rapid pace of the rapprochement with the mainland under Mr Ma. His share of the vote fell, from 58% four years ago, and his party has a reduced majority in the legislature. It suggests Mr Ma will now have to move more cautiously in his dealings with China, particularly in any area that touches on questions of sovereignty—such as a peace accord, much talked about, in which Taiwan and China would pledge not to resolve their differences by force.

Gone is the speculation common in the early days of Mr Ma’s presidency that this year might produce a breakthrough in cross-strait relations. After a decade at the helm, China’s president, Hu Jintao, will step down as Communist Party chief later this year (in a process involving not a hint of democracy). Some had hoped he and Mr Ma would wish to leave their mark on history with the first ever cross-strait summit. But Mr Hu, it is now clear, is far more caught up with problems at home, including ensuring economic growth and social stability as leaders jockey for positions in the new line-up. Certainly, Mr Ma lacks domestic support for such a meeting, and he has made it clear that China must address him as president if ever there were to be a summit. As ever, China’s media, in their reports on the elections, found it hard to describe the elections as presidential, except sometimes in quotation marks.

Yet if a survey conducted by a mainland internet portal, Sina.com, is any guide, Mr Ma enjoys strong support on the mainland too. Though the Communist Party has an abhorrence of multiparty democracy, mainland websites gave extensive coverage to Taiwan’s elections, even offering live video feeds of the vote-counting. (The tightly controlled print media were more circumspect in their reporting.) Of more than 26,000 responses to a Sina.com poll asking readers who they would prefer to win, nearly 55% chose Mr Ma, whereas more than a quarter supported a China-friendly rival, James Soong (who took less than 3% of the vote in Taiwan). Nearly 20% chose the China-sceptic Ms Tsai. All this in a country which may not even vote in television talent shows.

Li Fan of the World and China Institute, a small Beijing organisation, says that these mainland expressions of support for Ms Tsai were a mark of dissatisfaction with the Communist Party and indicated a desire for opposition politics at home. Mr Li led a rare delegation of mainland academics to observe the Taiwan elections. His five companions were all first-time visitors to the island and were amazed by its politics. “They never thought Taiwan was so free and democratic”, Mr Li enthuses. “It had a very powerful effect on them.” He says the polls give the lie to the Communist Party’s notion that democracy begets chaos.

What’s wrong with peaceful evolution?

In the minds of the party’s critics in China, Taiwan has greatly evolved in recent years. Mainland officials used once to deter overt expressions of sympathy for Taiwan by labelling those who showed any rapport as KMT agents or people out to split the motherland. But now that the island has managed a peaceable shift from thuggish dictatorship to democracy, Taiwan is much more often cited as a model these days. Several prominent Chinese dissidents-in-exile gathered in Taipei for the elections, singing the praises of the island’s politics. One of them, Wang Dan, who was a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, set up a “school for democracy” in Taipei last year.

One of China’s considered efforts in recent years to bolster support for Mr Ma and build a pro-China constituency on the island has been to allow Chinese tourists (most of them big-spending) to visit Taiwan. That may now be having the unintended effect of encouraging the spread of democratic ideas from Taiwan to the mainland. These were the first presidential and legislative elections to be conducted under the gaze of big numbers of mainland tourists (almost 1.3m came to Taiwan in 2011). Last June the two sides began allowing Chinese tourists to visit on their own rather than as part of tour groups, a move that helped some curious mainlanders to fly in to watch the elections. When they eased travel restrictions, political tourism was probably not what the mainland authorities had in mind.