The Political and Economic Transition in East Asia by Xiaoming Huang

Author:Xiaoming Huang [Huang, Xiaoming]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781136114502
Google: rYEnAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-09-05T05:50:06+00:00

A Democratically Contested State

The period from the end of the 1940s (when the Kuomintang, or KMT, government moved to Taiwan) to 1986 (when the principal opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, was founded and subsequently President Chiang Ching-kuo, towards the end of his life, ordered the lift of Martial Law banning free press and political parties) is regarded as the authoritarian era in the recent history of Taiwan. The following decade from 1986 to 1996, when ‘founding elections’ had been successfully held and for the first time the President was directly elected through popular vote, is generally considered as the period of democratic transition.

Thus, while some may see an earlier ‘juncture,’ for example, in 1977 when the ruling KTM suffered the first major setback in local elections and its local factions allied themselves with opposition forces in a rebellion against the KTM (Chen 1995: 268), many, including this author, see 1986 as the ‘starting point’ of the process of democratisation (Tien and Cheng 1997:1). For Tien and Chen, 1986 as the cutting-off point involves a sophisticated theory of democratisation. For this author, the year separated two very different historical periods in terms of the distribution of political authority. The authoritarian era featured the predominance of the party-state with political power concentrating in the hands of the state, the KMT, and its two successive chairmen, Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo. The democratisation, in essence, was a redistribution of the political power. Instead of the state being the sole power holder, political authority was relocated to the citizenry, exercised on their behalf by representative institutions: branches of national government, competitive political parties and local government.

The decade-long democratic power redistribution can be seen in three areas. The first was the establishment of a competitive party system. The rapid growth of the DPP and reorientation or revitalisation of the KMT led to the emergence of a competitive party system with the dominance of the two major political parties. Second, a series of steps in constitutional reform streamlined relations among branches of the national government distorted under the authoritarian party-state of the Cold War. The democratic power redistribution also took place intensively between the local and central government. As will be demonstrated in this study, the democratic process not only restructured the authority distribution, and provided legitimacy for the new political order, but also turned the state into an institution whose actions are accountable to the public, constrained by legal procedures, and subject to credible challenges from contending political forces and interest groups.

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