Course: POLSCI 353-01 Globalization of Democracy, Duke University
Instructor: Herbert Kitschelt
Teaching Assistant: Peng Peng
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China, proclaims itself an exemplary case of soaring economic development and successful democratization for the last few decades. However, it had been an authoritarian regime with a party-state system, rule of fear, and harsh penalty system after the WWII, and even more disturbing during the earlier period of Japanese occupation. How did Taiwan transition from an undeniable autocracy to one of the leading democracies in Asia? What are the different historical, cultural, political, economic, and sociological factors contribute or constrain the decades-long journey of democratization in Taiwan? In my review, I focus on how the formation of working class, development of social security and welfare system, and promotion of “China” identity contribute to Taiwan’s postwar democratization in different courses.
Introduction
First and foremost, for clarity and convenience purposes, this article uses “Taiwan” interchangeably with the “Republic of China” to refer the autonomous nation-state after the year of 1949. “China” is used to refer the sovereign state of the “People’s Republic of China” after 1949, excluding the island of Taiwan and affiliated territories. The term “island of Taiwan” is used to solely refer to the geographical territories.
After 50 years of Japanese occupation and colonization, the island of Taiwan was returned to the regime of the Republic of China on 25 October 1945. Instead of restoring the status of Taiwan as a province with “provincial autonomy” – relatively larger legislative and executive authority on the provincial level – under the Constitution of the Republic of China, the ROC establishes military government with centralized control by the Nationalist Party. Regarding themselves as the “new conquerors” (Washington News Daily 1946; Shi 1947), the administration in Taiwan largely impair the rule of law and the rights of aboriginal people, as well as initiating a series of political cleansings and even massacres in the name of counterinsurgency, including the well-known February 28th Incident (二二八事件) in 1947, killing hundreds to tens of thousands of people across the island. Taiwan issued the order of martial law (台灣省戒嚴令) and the special decree of counterinsurgency (動員戡亂時期臨時條款) in 1949, further restricting the political freedom and civil liberties in Taiwan, starting its 38-year-long White Terror. Many attempts of free association and anti-government publications failed, and thousands of people were arrested in the name of “CPC spies” (匪諜). The Kaohsiung Incident (美麗島事件) in 1979 marked a peak in Taiwanese people’s fight for democracy, where dissidents organized political rallies and protests in Kaohsiung on the International Human Rights Day. In the same year, the United States established diplomatic relationship with the People’s Republic of China and withdrew its diplomats in Taipei. In 1984, the assassination of Taiwanese-American political writer and commentator Henry Liu in California by ROC intelligence officers worsen the U.S.-Taiwan relations and seriously damaged the public image of the Nationalist government. With external pressures from the United States and under international isolation, then KMT Chairman Chiang Ching-Kuo promised ending the one-party rule in Taiwan and lifted the martial law in 1987, officially commencing the process of democratization in Taiwanese political system. Since then, Taiwan lifted its ban on political party associations and amended its constitutions for seven times, largely reframing the political institution to favor a more effective and democratic governance system. Today, Taiwan effectively promises political freedom and civil liberties in the island, has experienced three peaceful transition of power between the Nationalist Party and the Democratic Progressive Party, and becomes the first and only Asian country that legitimizes same-sex marriage nationally.
Literature Review
During the past decades, there has been many scholarly works offering both synthesized review of post-war Taiwanese political history and how specific events or factors have contributed or refrained the state reformation and democratization in Taiwan. As a quite comprehensive and profound review and reframe into Taiwanese state formation and reformation with both developments of authoritarian consolidation and democratization, Taiwan: A Political History by Denny Roy (2003) provides us a clear outlook of how great powers’ interests and visions of designing Taiwan clashes the locals’ determination of shaping their own destiny. Throughout its history of human settlement and development, Taiwan witnesses waves of conflicts both against external forces and within the native societal dynamics, where multiple and frequently contradictory identities and ideologies entangle with each other (Roy 2003).
Native Taiwanese scholar Allen Chun (1994) from Academia Sinica examines the Chinese nationalism promoted by KMT and its renationalization efforts in Taiwan behind the state reformation including the democratization in Taiwan in his journal article “From Nationalism to Nationalizing: Cultural Imagination and State Formation in Postwar Taiwan.” He explored the relationship between Taiwan’s post-war state reformation and traditional Chinese ideologies including Confucianism, ancient Chinese literatures, Chinese fine arts and cultural components, and Chinese social values of morality (Chun 1994: 53-56, 58-63).
However, I find that those literatures, despite covering a quite massive time span, do not cover sufficient aspects of contributors to the Taiwanese state formation and democratization. Ideologies, cultural components, and international environment are being over emphasized, with little attention to some other critical factors, such as development in terms of economics and formation of social classes.
The book Welfare Capitalism in Taiwan by Ku Yeun-wen (1997) engages in the development of state welfare system in the post-war Taiwan with details, filling an important gap in the various literatures on Taiwanese political development. Ku explores the general historic background of social welfare system on the island of Taiwan dating back to the period of Japanese colonialism, and he also analyzes the discrepancy between state policy rhetoric and actual policy implement due to structural issues (Wong 2000). In his article “State Reformation and the Formation of a Newly Emerging Welfare State in Taiwan”, Lin Chen-Wei discusses on how the development and reform of Taiwan’s state welfare system create and strengthen the legitimacy of the KMT regime. Literatures like these provide abundant historical insights and statistical methodologies to further my research into the connection between state welfare system and democratization in Taiwan.
Ho Ming-sho’s book Working Class Formation in Taiwan: Fractured Solidarity in State-Owned Enterprises provides me with insights into the resistance of Taiwanese workers, especially in the context of state-owned enterprises under the KMT rule with tightened totalitarian-like control. It contends that much of the worker’s resistance thus the formation and development of working class is nonobvious throughout that specific period of time (Babones 2016). With the historical outlook and political-cultural background provided, I rely more heavily on statistical evidence and inference that may suggest a clearer sign and path of the formation and development of working class and how it contributed to the democratization in Taiwan.
Commencement and Amendment of Social Security System
The origin of social security and welfare system within the formal state institutions can date back to the 1947 Constitution of the Republic of China, where its Section 4 of Chapter 13 outlines the state’s responsibility of providing appropriate social security system to the general public. The Constitution sets out many measures to guarantee the social welfare with details, including employment, labor rights and welfares, social security and aids, women’s and children’s welfares, nationwide medical insurance, and state-owned medical services (中華民國憲法 (The Constitution of the Republic of China) 1947). That was quite an exemplary standard of social security and welfare system not only in Asia but also the world merely two years after the WWII. Nevertheless, the reality wasn’t as promising. In 1958, instead of establishing a unified nationwide social security system, Taiwan passed several laws concerning the establishment of 4 separate social security systems: military insurance, government official insurance, educational employee insurance, and labor insurance. Each insurance system has quite distinctive standards of the percentage of reimbursement and the categories covered. For example, the labor insurance (勞工保險), which was the comprehensive social insurance for all eligible employees in public and private sectors excluding the military, government, and educational sector, provides pension payment based on individual average salaries once a year, if the insurance policy holder was enrolled less than 15 years (勞工保險條例 (Act of Labor Insurance) 1958). However, the public official insurance (公務人員保險) pays its policy holder 4 times more with the same criterion (公務人員保險法 (Government Official Insurance Law) 1958). This creates a rather large discrepancy between the social welfare for different groups of people, as explained in Ku Yeon-wen (1997). As more dissatisfaction and even conflicts were arousing from the public, the KMT regime began to design a reformed universal health insurance to resolve some long-existing issues in the social security system. The Executive Yuan set forth the National Health Insurance (全民健康保險) in its 1986 macroeconomic projection and programming report (Executive Yuan 1986), which is only one year prior to the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987, which ends the single-party authoritarian rule of the KMT. After that, in 1991 the Department of Health (衛生署) established its working panel on founding and implementing the NHI starting mid-1990s. Finally, the National Health Insurance Law (全民健康保險法) and the Act of Organizing National Health Insurance Administration (中央健康保險局組織條例) were enacted in 1994. A year later, the NHI was officially commenced. In 2003, the insurance identity card system was completely digitized with nationwide issuance of NHI IC cards (Lin 2012: 583).
Now, we’d like to see how these historic moments regarding the development of social security system has shaped the changing curve of Taiwan’s democracy score. Based on the Polity IV dataset, which codes every state in the world from the year of 1800 (or the year of state establishment) to 2018 on the democracy- and autocracy-scale (Center for Systemic Peace 2020), the democracy index of Taiwan from 1949 to 2018 is curved and shown on the graph below. Along this curve, we can find out that 4 of the 5 turning points from more autocratic to more democratic are corresponding to the key events of development of Taiwanese social security and welfare system, introduced in the last paragraph. The score increased from -7 to -1 in the year of 1987, one year after the government’s announcement of the National Health Insurance in 1986. The largest increase in history, from -1 to 7 in 1992, closely followed the formal commencement of NHI preparation teams and work. The gradual increase from 1995 to 1997 corresponds to the enactment of the two laws concerning the new social security system in 1994. Lastly, the issuance of new type of NHI IC cards was followed by a minor increase from 9 to 10 marked in 2004. These are hardly coincidences since the time stamps of development of Taiwanese social security and welfare system precisely match the turning points of Taiwan’s Polity IV score. It’s also quite unconvincing to rebut that it was actually democratization that unidirectionally leads to the key developmental events of NHI, since we notice that the corresponding growths on the value of democracy index are lagged by one to two years of time. If we assume that democracy is the exogenous factor, it will be the development of NHI being lagged. Of course, one feasible counterargument would be that other political and sociological factors might also served as contributors to the surges of democracy index, such as presidential elections, rotation of governments, issuance of milestone legislations. Regardless, the least we could identify is a positive correlation between the development of social security and welfare in Taiwan and its democracy index. And, since we have essentially ruled out the possibility of reverse causality, we could infer that it is more likely that the development of social welfare was a positive contributor, no matter how significant, to democratization in the historical case of Taiwan.
With limited data access and statistical inference methodologies, we may proceed instead with historical and literary evidence to the question of “why and how did social welfare contributed to Taiwan’s democratization?”
As explained earlier in this article, the social security systems prior to the establishment of NHI were separate with distinctive segregations of eligibility and huge discrepancy on policy benefits. A report by the Examination Yuan of R.O.C., the national institution for civil servant admissions and bureaucracy administration, provides yet another proof of the policy biases for military and government officials, corroborating the analysis of legal documents that I make. It reveals that the pension payments for government officials are actually 6 times higher than those for private sector labors (Examination Yuan 2013). It is also reported that the retirement age is discriminatory against private sector labors – the true average age of first pension payment (based on national statistics) is 43 for military personnel, 54 for educational employees, 55 for government officials, and 61 for labors – creating a even worse disparity of social welfare distribution (Taiwan People News 2016). There had even been a special decree for allocating wanted supplies such as grains and meats to government officials and educational employees till the mid-1980s (中央文職公教人員生活必需品配給辦法1972). This disparity of social welfare was both a cause to and a representation of the social inequality in Taiwan throughout its period of authoritarian rule. Military and government officials, together with educational employees who were generally regarded as government employees since most schools in Taiwan were state-owned, were much favored with heavily inclined policy promises and resource accesses.
Largely, the social security and welfare system in Taiwan have been established and enforced by the KMT regime in order to maintain its legitimacy and stability of regime. This explains why the ranking of priority favored the military and government personnel as they are more than crucial to secure the regime’s security. The institutional failure behind that scheme was temporality, where the society became more ruptured and civilians less satisfied with the system that only truly benefits those in power and those who assisted the people in power. It was yet another form of principal-agent problem where some agents themselves were threats to the regime’s stability and security, thus the interests of principals (in this case true social security and welfare) had to be tabled in order to please and stabilize those agents, as a trade-off. This policy inclination and uneven welfare distribution initiated unsatisfaction and protestation from the bottom, serving as one of the foundations in Taiwan’s road to democratization. As the road was being paved, Taiwan’s social security and welfare system also started institutional reforms to eliminate or alleviate those inclinations and inequities. The increased access to social welfare empowers the civilians, combined with the lift of political party bans and the state-owned corporation reforms, making the private sector a more vibrant force to initiate democratic reforms in not only top-down political and institutional channels but also bottom-up social and community channels.
Disorganization and Empowerment of Working Class
The history of working-class labor rights movement in Taiwan can date back to the Japanese colonial period, as early as the 1920s, which Ho Ming-sho commented on his book as “nonobvious resistance” (Babones 2016). Indeed, the organization of working class and revolutionary movements in Taiwan were relatively weak during the Japanese occupation due to the ideological conflicts and power struggle among different organizations and figures within the working-class alignment, despite some short-lived working-class-centered political organizations and movements, such as the formation of Taiwanese Federation of Laborers and the Communist Party of Taiwan (with the help from the Communist International) in 1928 (Jiang 2017). Most of these few organizations and movements were closed or destroyed by the Japanese colonial authorities in the 1930s, and the working class in Taiwan has been disorganized since then.
A landmark resistant movement of local Taiwanese islanders (本省人) broke out on 28 February 1947, just 16 months after the transfer of civil authority in Taiwan from Japan to the Republic of China in October 1945. The “2-28 Incident” (二二八事件) was primarily initiated and led by local people originated from Taiwan, in opposition to the repressive rule from the KMT regime which comprised predominantly officials stationed from the Chinese mainland. The local level KMT authorities in Taiwan committed political cleansing and massacre during that incident , in consideration of stabilizing the control of critical manufacturing industries, such as sugar production and power generation, by the non-natives (外省人) (Babones 2016). Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of civilians were killed amid that incident and, as a result, the organization and movements of native working-class resistance had been largely constrained since then.
After the declaration of martial law and the complete destruction of CCP’s provincial organizations in Taiwan in late 1940s and early 1950s, there was hardly any effective, even if small-scale and underground, forms of organization of working-class labors in Taiwan. The only nationwide labor unions legally approved in Taiwan until 1997 is the Chinese Federation of Labour (中華民國全國總工會), tightly controlled by the KMT regime. The Order of Martial Law in the Province of Taiwan prohibited all assemblies, strikes, demonstrations, and protests since its issuance in 1949 till its abolition in 1987, thus disabling any actual, effective bottom-up, self-organized working-class and labor rights movements (臺灣省政府、臺灣省警備總司令部佈告戒字第壹號 (Order of Martial Law in the Province of Taiwan) 1949). Throughout the entire martial-law period, there wasn’t any major event regarding the self-organization and resistance of workers, apart from some publications concerning labor rights. Since the KMT party-state system often times control the majority or the critical components of Taiwan’s industry, the state-organized trade unions naturally assumed the role of bureaucratic management and defenders of state interests for the state-owned corporations and government agencies. Without formal and well-stablished platforms, Taiwanese workers during the martial-law period had huge difficulties to formulate a unified identity of “working class” and take united actions.
Only
starting from 1980s where political control by the KMT was loosened, some small-scale
local-level labor unions began to form and function as an independent force. Statistics
from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics shows that the
labor participation rate had
been increasing from the
year of 1982 to around 1990. A series of domestic and international political
events, including the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, termination of
ROC-United States diplomatic
relations in 1979, and
Kaohsiung Incident in December 1979, provided crucial prerequisites and catalysts
of democratic labor rights movements as well as the gradual formation of
labor-oriented political organizations in the 1980s. With the macro domestic
and international backgrounds and the self-organizations of civilians,
predominantly working-class, throughout the nation, the KMT gradually loosened
up its enforcement of martial law and promised step-by-step a plan of
democratic reform.
After the lift of martial law in Taiwan, we witnessed a decline of unionization rate in Taiwan, but that does not necessarily indicate that the working-class organization has been declined. Beginning in 1986, a number of labor-oriented parties began to form, including the Worker’s Party, the Labor Party, and the well-known Democratic Progressive Party, which is today Taiwan’s incumbent governing party. Prior to the democratic reforms and the associations of labor-oriented political organizations, the working-class movements had been heavily focused on improving working conditions and individual well-beings, instead of changing the society and reforming the broader political institutions that produced working and living dilemmas for workers (Babones 2016). On the contrary, during the first decade of Taiwanese democratization, the resistance and organizations of the working class was closely around formal institutions of political parties and associations, due to the rising number of newly formed parties that granted workers with unprecedented access to direct participation of politics as well as platforms and resources to organize and empower. Consequently, the labor unionization rate displays a decreasing tendency from around 1990 to 2000.
Despite the declining unionization rate during that time period, the working-class resistance was the most successful since the end of WWII in Taiwan from 1990 to 2000, with the support and alignment of political parties. In 1994, labor movement organizations successfully persuaded the Legislative Yuan to modify the labor insurance reimbursement ratio in favor of labors. In 1997, labors in Taiwan made a triumph in impelling the government to apply Labor Standards Act to financial industries including banks, private insurance, and securities (Taiwan Federation of Financial Unions 2017). In 1999, Awakening Foundation (婦女新知基金會) united several women rights organizations and concerned political parties in Taiwan to initiate strikes and demonstrations to urge the government to pass the Act of Gender Equality in Employment (性別工作平等法), which later gained support from the Democratic Progressive Party and its presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian and was eventually enacted in 2001 (Awakening Foundation 2002). The working-class organizations and movements in that period of time already went beyond merely demanding better working conditions and social welfares for individual communities but promoting broader justice for the larger society in the form of legislations and formal political institutional reforms. This also corresponds to the surge of democracy index of Taiwan during the 1990s and early 2000s. The labors’ participation at the time in the forms of protests, assemblies, and lobbying transformed into defined legal and political institutions where labors nowadays can address certain issues through a well-established civil, political channel.
In late 2000s and 2010s, the working-class and labor-rights-oriented self-organizations and resistance movements have been increasing. Examples include the large-scale opposition to the Tsai administration’s aggressive attempt to reform the two-day weekend system by amending the Labor Standards Act in 2017, formation of Left-wing Alliance against the “capitalist rule” of Taiwan in 2018, and major strikes in Taoyuan initiated by flight attendants and pilots of the two major Taiwanese airlines in 2019. These pieces of anecdotal evidence correspond to the continuing democratization and liberalization in Taiwan, with landmarks of third-time rotation of government, legalization of same sex marriages, and further reform of pension systems.
The domestic and international environments and trends that favor democratization serve as the sparkles and catalysts of working-class formation and organization, from individual-level nonobvious resistance to institutional-level direct participation in politics, which sequentially served as driving forces of the democratic reform and mobilization around the 1980s. In the other way around, an increasingly proactive and effective working class with stronger participation in various forms and channels promotes and, more importantly, supervises the continuing democratization in Taiwan, with more accesses and resources.
Conclusion
With multiple statistical, literary, documentary, and anecdotal evidence, this article provides a general review of how the development of social security and welfare system and that of working-class formation and organization contributes to Taiwan’s regime transformation from a single-party authoritarian regime to one of the most advanced democracies in Asia. We discovered the correlation between the stages of development of social security and welfare system and institutions throughout the post-war Taiwanese history and Taiwan’s democracy index in Polity IV coding. We inferred that the development of social security system is more of an explanatory variable than a response variable. We also discussed on how early social security systems created an interesting form of principal-agent problems and deteriorated the inequality in post-war Taiwan, and how the gradual reforms of the social security system empowers the private sectors as another contributing force to democratization apart from top-down drivers. To examine the working-class formation and organization, we made use of the historical, statistical, documentary, and anecdotal evidence of labor unionization in Taiwan since the Japanese colonial period. We discussed how the KMT’s party-state system limited the functionality of labor unions before the 1970s and how domestic and international environments favored the growth of working-class resistance starting from late 1970s. We also explored how recent surge of labor rights movements echoes the development of formal political and legal institutions and the continuing trend of democratization in Taiwan.
Taiwan is a young democracy still facing quite a lot of challenges to overcome and problems to solve, including the complete elimination of policy inclination towards military and government officials and improving labor rights protection mechanisms and welfare system. Both social security and welfare and working-class organization will still serve as vital actors in Taiwanese politics and push forwards or stand guards for its democratization.
This paper has references from 24 external sources. Please see the original document to view the full list.
Special legal statement concerning the Hong Kong National Security Law: The author acknowledges that, in accordance with the constitution and the laws of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan is a part of its national, sovereign territories as a province. The author has no intention and takes no action to separate Taiwan, or any other territories of China, from the People’s Republic of China. The author has no intention and takes no action to overthrow the regime of the People’s Republic of China. The author has no intention and takes no action to conspire with the authority or political organizations in Taiwan or any country beyond China. The author uses certain phrases and terms to distinguish the political authorities existing in different places and to cite the official names of organizations and/or documents.
關於《港區國安法》的特別法律聲明：本文作者承認，根據中華人民共和國憲法和法律，臺灣作為壹個省，是中華人民共和國國家主權領土的壹部分。本文作者沒有意圖且從未采取任何行動將臺灣，或任何其他中國領土，從中華人民共和國分離出去。本文作者沒有意圖且從未采取任何行動顛覆中華人民共和國的政權。本文作者沒有意圖且未采取任何行動勾結或密謀在臺灣或中國之外任何國家的政權機構或政治組織。本文作者使用某些特定詞組和術語是為了區分不同地方存在的政權機構，及援引組織和/或文件的正式名稱。