The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong by Fulda Andreas;

Author:Fulda, Andreas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

THE RISE AND DEMISE OF THE KMT PARTY-STATE IN TAIWAN

The Chinese Nationalist Party—or as it is better known under its transcribed Chinese name Kuomintang (KMT)—has for a long time been considered one of the world’s richest parties.1 Yet in November 2016 something remarkable happened: the KMT was unable to pay its staff and had to lay off more than half of its 738 employees.2 After winning both the presidency and gaining a majority in Taiwan’s parliament in January 2016, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had

passed a law that assumes that all the KMT’s property is ill-gotten, bar membership fees, donations and the funding political parties receive from the government. The law allows the government to freeze the KMT’s assets while a committee assesses whether the party is the rightful owner, and to seize them if it judges otherwise. The KMT will only be able to reclaim assets it can prove it obtained legitimately.3

The DPP’s law stripping the KMT of its assets is significant, as it previously ruled the island-state for more than six decades: from 1945 until the narrow election victory of DPP president Chen Shui-bian in 2000, and then again during the KMT presidency of Ma Ying-jeou from 2008 until 2016.

The demise of the KMT’s party-state in 2016 also means that it took Taiwan’s democracy movement more than 100 years—beginning with the establishment of Taiwan’s first opposition organisation, the short-lived Assimilation Society (Dokakai) from 1914 to 1915, which lobbied for the rights of Taiwanese under Japanese rule4—to overcome authoritarianism by peaceful means. November 2016 marks a turning point in the island’s political history, since a financially broken KMT, which Cheng Tun-Jen in 2006 already described as “an anachronistic nation-building party and a catch-all party”,5 will not be able to re-emerge as an autocratic party-state in Taiwan’s future. The case of Taiwan shows that it is possible to defeat Leninist parties through social and political movements as well as through the ballot box.

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