extension of Taiwan’s existing “pragmatic diplomacy,” China reacted unexpectedly and extremely strongly to Lee’s visit, arguing that this represented a major change in American policy supporting Lee’s alleged effort to turn “creeping officiality” into Taiwan Independence. Indeed, China went ballistic (almost literally) during 1995-96 with a series of war games and missile tests close to Taiwan that were clearly aimed at intimidating voters in the December legislative and March presidential elections. The United States responded with very clear military deterrence aimed at the PRC by, for example, sending aircraft carrier groups through the Taiwan Strait. The confrontation quickly de-escalated after Lee handily won re-election, but as shown in Figure 1 this set off a series of crises that erupted, on average, every two years, with Beijing and Taipei alternating in the initiation of the confrontation. For example, Lee Teng-hui enraged China and flustered the United States in 1999 by proclaiming that Taipei and Beijing were linked by “special state-to-state relations;” and China retaliated by attempting to intimidateTaiwanese voters in the 2000 presidential election and by ignoring the conciliatory policies of the new President Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party after the election. President Chen, for his part, set off another round of hostility when he proclaimed that there is “one country on each side of the ” in July 2002. Subsequently, Chen’s
Relations with China were much more volatile, despite Chen Shui-bian’s image as a zealot in promoting the declaration of de jure Taiwan Independence. Chen’s pushing the envelope on the Independence issue commenced in the summer of 2002 when he proclaimed the theory that “one country on each side of the Taiwan Strait” existed, provoking significant unhappiness in both Beijing and Washington. After that, he periodically set off contretemps with Beijing and Washington until he left office in 2008, as he challenged China’s “red lines” on Taiwan Independence by, for example, proposing or holding referenda on issues that might affect Taiwan’s international status and by advocating fundamental change to the country’s Constitution. Yet, there were also signs of pragmatism in Chen’s policies toward relations. He was fairly conciliatory toward an unresponsive PRC for his first two years in office and negotiated a “Ten Point Consensus” with the widely perceived pro-China James Soong in early 2005. More broadly, he followed a pattern of being aggressive toward China during electoral campaigns to appeal to the “deep Green” Taiwanese nationalists and then sounding much more conciliatory after the election was over. Indeed, he only became stridently pro-Independence consistently in 2006 when burgeoning scandals deprived him of support from almost everybody except the deep Greens. Strait
For their part, the KMT and its “Blue” coalition (named for one of the colors in the KMT flag) returned to a much more “China-centric” stance after Lee Teng-hui left the party following its defeat in the 2000 presidential election. According to the model developed by Yu-shan Wu, this represented a direct response to their electoral situation. During elections, Wu argues that the KMT acts like a catch-all party and appeals to moderate voters with centrist policies. Between elections when the party is out of power (as it was from 2000 to 2008), in contrast, it focuses its appeals on keeping the support of the pro-China “deep Blues,” while acting in a more pragmatic or “realist” manner when it controls the government. By the middle of the decade in the 21st century, therefore, a harsh and viciously divisive debate over relations and national identity had come to dominate Taiwan’s politics. The Greens argued that they must “stand up for ” and accused the Blues of selling out to . In stark contrast, the Blues contended that the Greens were needlessly provocative and that a more accommodating policy could defuse the threat from . Taken to the extreme (which they often were), these positions implied that one side was the savior and the other the destroyer of and its statehood. Unfortunately, both critiques seem to have had some merit. President Chen’s periodic appeals to his pro-Independence “base constituency” for primarily Strait
consolidated his power, he managed to straddle the national identity issue quite astutely, implicitly portraying himself as a moderate between the pro-Independence DPP and the pro-Unification members of the KMT and (after 1993) the New Party who tended to be Mainlanders. While retaining a commitment to Unification with China in the indefinite future, he aggressively began to pursue the “pragmatic diplomacy” of trying to upgrade Taiwan’s international status. Furthermore, the victory of Lee’s “Mainstream” faction clearly promoted the “Taiwanization” of the party -- which made it hard to blame it for the repression of the “old” KMT. Figure 2 about here For its part, the DPP to moderate its position on Taiwan Independence in the early 1990s after the inclusion of a pro-Independence plank in the party charter cost it significantly at the polls in1991. In particular, the Chinese military threats during the 1996 presidential elections and the woeful showing of the pro-Independence DPP candidate evidently convinced most of its leaders that Taiwan Independence was simply unfeasible. Consequently, the DPP began to downplay without ever formally renouncing it. For example, some (but far from all) DPP leaders began to argue that Taiwan already was an independent country, so there was no need for a formal declaration of Independence.