Mdme. Tsai Goes to Washington

Mdme. Tsai Ing-wen, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate for president in the 2016 Taiwan elections, came to Washington and appeared at the Center for Strategic and International Studies a.k.a. Pivot Central to make some remarks, chat with Kurt Campbell (proud pivot pappy), and do some Q&A moderated by the indefatigable pivot sherpa Bonnie Glaser (more on that later).

Tsai gave a good account of herself in her prepared remarks: competent, appealing, moderate, etc.  She also provided a look at what a DPP wanted to do, wouldn’t do—and might be unable to do—if it gained control of the presidency, a pretty good bet given the comatose nature of the KMT’s presidential campaign.

For US audiences, perhaps the key statement was her reaffirmation of “the status quo” a.k.a. “no Taiwan independence” (go to the 17 minute mark).

Subsequently, Campbell did ask an interesting question about the cohesion of Taiwan society given its significant divisions, a sign to me that US policymakers are interested in the possibility that gridlock in Taiwan political institutions will lead to escalating “Sunflower” style street action—or perhaps a DPP gambit to piggyback on student unrest and declare that the unambiguous will of the Taiwan people expressed in mass demonstration compels an independence referendum pronto, sorry about that--and a messy opposing reaction.  Tsai responded with the generic “democratic dialogue” kumbaya optimism which, I should say, I don’t quite share.

Campbell elicited Tsai’s statement on the South China Sea issue, very much CSIS’s obsession de jour.  Tsai obligingly ticked off the talking points: peaceful, international law, UN conventions, & “as you said, freedom of navigation”.

Getting East Asian democracies to nut up and back the US SCS play is, post Shangri La, a diplomatic priority.  On June 4, Danny Russel openly called on the Republic of Korea to support the US position, apparently as part of the public frontloading of expectations for ally fealty that has become an inseparable element of pivot promotion.

Per Yonhap:

"The fact that, like the United States, the Republic of Korea is not a claimant, in my view, gives Seoul all the more reason to speak out because it is speaking not in self-interest, but speaking in support of universal principles and the rule of law," [Russel] said.

It was the first time that a senior American official has publicly asked South Korea to play a role in the territorial dispute. The remark came ahead of a visit to Washington by South Korean President Park Geun-hye later this month.

Parenthetically, I find the look for “disinterested” supporters interesting.  It is nice to get everybody to make approving noises in favor of nice things that they have no “interest” in expending blood & treasure to defend while the dominant regional power has made it clear it regards the same issue as an existential “core interest”.

Although I serially excoriate the media for falling for the “freedom of navigation in the South China Sea” canard (since the term has zero significance in terms of economic security or unhindered commercial passage that everybody is supposedly caring about), “military freedom of navigation” does have a genuine attraction to militaries that want to operate in the South China Sea. (I will cover the history of military freedom of navigation in the SCS in a subsequent post.  Consider yourself warned!)

Taiwan has its own claim in the South China Sea, indeed the largest island claim (Itu Aba), which has the largest airfield in the Spratlys (for now), and its own fresh water.  The ROC occasionally sends a submarine to Itu Aba, so it has an interest in military FoN in the SCS.

In fact, Itu Aba is in the throes of a $100 million construction project, something that Campbell obligingly forebore to mention despite the US demand that “everybody” cease island reclamation, and which Tsai naturally didn’t bring up.  The ROC even had to hire a PRC ship to haul some caissons down to Itu Aba for the construction ! The port construction is supposed to be completed in a few months and then Taiwan will be able to dock vessels, military & otherwise, there as well, and further inject itself into the SCS mix. 

An interesting element of the Philippine UNCLOS arbitration case against the PRC is that if the Philippines wins, it will also weaken Itu Aba’s presumptive claim to a 200 mile EEZ (an impassioned legal eagle in the Philippines heatedly accused a Philippine judge of treason for neglecting, perhaps for sound reasons of diplomatic calculation, to attack the Taiwan claim in the arbitration filing).  

The DPP, as befits its Taiwan indigene roots, is relatively blase about Taiwan’s island claims (Kinmen, Matsu, Tiaoyutai, and, I would guess, Itu Aba), which it regards as excess baggage Chiang Kai-shek carried to Taiwan in 1949.  So if the DPP wins, it will probably be relatively unconcerned if Itu Aba is collateral damage in the Philippine assault on the Nine-Dash-Line.  Another matter for the KMT, of course, and I wonder if the KMT will try to play the “holy ground of the motherland” card in the election.

Mdme. Tsai’s Q&A didn’t go so smoothly.  She had to field a question on the “1992 consensus”, a term the DPP detests, from a mainland journo.

The “1992 consensus” was basically an intentional and necessary muddling of the One China issue during meetings by the (KMT-controlled) Taiwan administration and the PRC in Hong Kong that enabled the development of cross-strait ties.  As befits its Taiwan independence inclinations, the DPP scorns the idea that any successor government should consider itself bound to uphold that mush-mouthed whatever it is (there was no joint declaration; heck, there weren’t even parallel unilateral statements; something was stated verbally, sometime, somewhere: "On November 3 [1992], a responsible person of the Communist Chinese ARATS said that it is willing to “respect and accept” SEF’s proposal that each side “verbally states” its respective principles on “one China.").

The DPP would apparently like to consign the One China assumption of the 1992 consensus to the dustbin of history as a steppingstone toward independence, something that becomes politically easier with every passing year as more people identify themselves as “Taiwanese” and “Chinese” identifiers become more of an eccentric niche group.

However, p*ssing off the dominant regional power & biggest trading partner ($29 billion of a $140 billion total pie) is not the most obvious path to security, prosperity, & overall happiness. 

Therefore, Tsai was quite energetic in her remarks about the unsatisfactory results of the current mainland-centric Taiwan economic model, the undesirability of further interdependence, and the need to “diversify” the Taiwan economy & shift it to “innovation” instead of manufacturing, and presumably toward the United States & Japan and away from the mainland.  She also talked about Taiwan businessmen having to learn to handle failure, perhaps a backhanded warning that the mainland-manufacturing-linked sector should brace itself for some creative destruction if/when the DPP tries to implement its diversification strategy.  Good luck with that.  

Obviously the DPP is not quite ready to talk about unambiguously dumping the 1992 consensus and with it the economic relationship with the PRC.

So for the mainland, it’s red line time and “do you affirm the 1992 consensus” has become a tactic to put the DPP on the spot and force it either to alienate the middle-of-the-road segment of the electorate (and the US) with a prematurely provocative stance or, well, revel in the spectacle of its own weakness and hypocrisy in the eyes of its base.

So Mdme. Tsai threw some serious shade on the questioner, replying coolly that she had covered that issue in her remarks.  Since she hadn’t really addressed the issue, this drew a chuckle from the audience. 

But the next two questions were on the same topic & Tsai had to repeat her “already covered this” line more and more stiffly and by the end nobody was laughing.

And the last guy also asked some PRC-friendly question about Tsai’s plans to increase Taiwan military spending.

By my count, Tsai got one softball question, and four awkward questions from PRC journos and pundits who had apparently salted the room.

Unless Bonnie Glaser intentionally called on four pro-PRC questioners to put Tsai on her mettle, which I kinda doubt, she’s going to have to hit the books and figure out the names and faces of the friendlies and the not-so-friendlies before her next hosting gig. 

My personal opinion: the PRC should be relieved, not dismayed if Tsai becomes president.  

If the KMT stays in power, activists will feed the narrative that rad street activism is needed to save Taiwan from getting sold out, the DPP will endorse and exploit the demonstrations as a matter of sound political calculation, and the ineluctable polarization of Taiwan (and the increasing marginalization of pro-mainland opinion) will accelerate.  

If Tsai is in power, on the other hand, she’ll have her hands full pushing her agenda while wrestling with the demands of the younger activists and coping with KMT obstructionism—and distracted from the vital task of trying to pull the island’s economy out of the mainland’s enormous gravitational field.

Hillary Drops the Big One: Taiwan = Ukraine

Back in March, I presciently speculated about (and J. Michael Cole pined for) a Taiwanese political uprising that would combine domestic mass resistance to the KMT's mainland-friendly policies with US institutional support a la Maidan and whip up a political froth that might result in the sidelining of the KMT, the acquisition of political momentum and even political power by a pro-US/pro-independence led by the KMT's independence-friendly and mainland-averse rival, the Democratic People's Party, and a gigantic black eye for the People's Republic of China.

The first salvo occurred a couple days later, with the occupation of the ROC parliament by student demonstrators, the Sunflower Movement, opposed to a cross-strait trade and service pact negotiated between the government and the PRC.  At that time, the US government stayed on the sidelines and the semi-official US presence in Taiwan, the American Institute in Taiwan, reviled by many as an enabler of KMT-PRC rapprochement don't rock the boatism, actually criticized the occupation.

Now it looks like Hillary Clinton has put Taiwan in play as a geopolitical counter in her ongoing confrontation with the People's Republic of China, which characterized her term as Secretary of State and looks to define, for better or worse, her expected presidency.  I don't believe that Secretary Clinton is just talking up the benefits of the Trans Pacific Partnership and Taiwan's membership in a U.S.-led trade bloc.  She's referring specifically to the advisability of putting a brake on development of cross-strait integration.

Expect the DPP and the Sunflower Movement to take Clinton's statements as offering the prospect of US support, as well as encouragement to resist the KMT government's cross-strait policies and challenge its legitimacy and effectiveness in a multitude of venues beyond the conventional electoral and parliamentary fora (where the DPP is currently trapped in impotent minority status thanks to the black magic of the democratic process).  Since the current government is pretty unpopular, there is ample mischief that can be achieved in the name of "national emergency".  Ma Ying-jyeou = Yanukovich, PRC = Russia, KMT = Party of Regions etc. 

And since the opposition to the KMT is firmly rooted in the discourse of Taiwan independence, there's even a World War III vibe over Taiwan that was only fitfully present in the whole US + Maidan v. Russia confrontation.

I guess Clinton is doing Taiwan the favor of warning it to conduct its pro-US political ruckus sooner than later so that, unlike Ukraine, it doesn't find itself torn in two by the struggle.

Good luck with that!  I predict interesting times.

From the June 25 Taipei Times:

Reliance on China makes Taiwan vulnerable: Clinton

Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton said the government’s push for closer cross-strait ties could lead to Taiwan losing its economic and political independence and becoming vulnerable to over-reliance on China, according to an interview in the next edition of the Chinese-language magazine Business Weekly.

Widely expected to make a run in the 2016 US presidential election, Clinton made her position on the Taiwan-China relationship clear in the interview, which was conducted in Los Angeles on Thursday last week.

Citing Ukraine’s relations with Russia as a cautionary tale, she advised Taiwan’s leaders to be careful, or Taiwan might lose its current political independence.

“Economic independence goes with political independence,” she said. “How far can you go before you lose your economic independence? Because it will affect your political independence.”
Economic opportunities mean there are growing cross-strait connections and now Taiwan has arrived at “a turning point,” she said.

“Now you have to decide how dependent economically you become… How ... do you handle the [cross-strait] relationship, if you say this far, but no farther?” Clinton said. “That will put pressure on you from China, if they want more, but you have to make these evaluations based on what you think is in the long-term interest of Taiwan.”

It may be difficult for Taiwan to strike a good balance with China, because “it will be harder and harder, because the demands from China will grow, because [China] is growing so much,” she said.
Taiwan should proceed with caution, as decisions made now could have “unintended consequences,” she said, adding, “you have to look five years, 10 years from now on, to see if that’s where you want to end up.”

She reiterated the US’ support for Taiwan.

“We have been willing to support Taiwan in many ways, [even] against China’s objections, and we will continue to do so,” she said.

The interview is reportedly Clinton’s first one-on-one with a Taiwanese media organization, and the first time she has stated her position on cross-strait development.

On Democracy and the Occupation of the Taiwan Legislature

With regard to the occupation of the Taiwan legislature and, in particular, the DPP’s determination to sidetrack the democratic process when the numbers were not in its favor on its pet issues, I was the recipient of some indignant feedback along the lines of Gandhi, MLK, etc. i.e. on issues of moral imperatives you gotta do what’s right, not just count the votes.

Color me unconvinced. The big existential issue is reunification with the mainland.  That ship has sailed.  96% of the population regards itself as Taiwanese.  60% oppose reunification, outnumbering proponents of reunification 3:1.  The ROC is de facto independent.  After 30+ years of elected governments, no political party is going to be able to impose reunification on Taiwan.  If the KMT tries, the entire population of Taiwan is welcome to hit the bricks, with my blessing.

With reunification off the table, the key issue is whether Taiwan should tilt toward or away from the mainland economically.  That’s a question for the voters to decide, not the DPP caucus strategists and the indignant multitudes.  The presidential election in January 2016 beckons to voters who believe that the KMT's outreach to the mainland on cross-strait service trade should be reversed.

But if the KMT is screwed up six ways from sideways and feels obliged to cave to the demonstrators, be my guest.  This will simply confirm the dysfunctional character of Taiwan politics (remember the fits the pan-Blues gave Chen Shuibian?) and incentivize the KMT to play similar tricks if Su Tseng-chang becomes president. 

The DPP leadership probably feels that partisan rancor enhances polarization, will condition the people to give up on any consensus-based, KMT-mediated accommodation with the mainland, and further reconcile Taiwanese to the risky alternative of de jure independence.  Time and demographics, together with DPP militancy, are whittling away at Taiwan’s emotional links to the mainland.  Polarization is ugly, but it’s good politics for the DPP and its independence agenda, so I don’t expect it’s going to disappear.

The one remaining existential issue that remains in Taiwanese politics is strictly in the hands of the DPP and the Green coalition: de jure independence.  If properly done, this would involve a constitutional convention to define and reaffirm the basis of Taiwanese sovereignty, with lots of democratic voting for delegates to the convention and votes on the new constitution itself, and I find it interesting that the new student demand is, indeed, for a constitutional convention.  Of course, that’s not to say Taiwanese independence won’t turn out to be a quick and dirty legalistic train wreck shoved through by the DPP along the lines of Kosovo or Crimea, but I hope it isn’t.

Taiwanese democracy is good but (to further editorialize here) the practice of Taiwanese democracy looks pretty craptacular.  It’s probably better to recognize and encourage the good thing—lots of people voting—and less of the bad thing—people using the justification of moral imperative to block democratic processes in order to advance narrow political and tactical agendas.

What’s Going on in Taiwan?

The ineluctable drift of Taiwan outside of the PRC’s political orbit, with a helping shove from Taiwan’s DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), that’s what’s going on.

On March 18, on the occasion of the Crimean referendum, I wrote a piece speculating on what would happen if the United States decided to support a Maidan-style insurrection against an elected but unpopular and pro-Chinese administration in Taiwan.

Well, mirabile dictu, on the same day the insurrection appeared…but no US support, as yet, anyway.

The occasion was the occupation of the Republic of China legislature by student activists determined to prevent passage of the “Cross Strait Services Trade Agreement” (hereinafter CSSTA) between the ROC and the PRC, climaxed by a big demonstration against the pact in Taipei on March 30.

The CSSTA opens various Taiwan and PRC service industries to mutual investment.  It is a piece of neo-liberal free trade bullshit whose advantages to Taiwan’s economy have probably been oversold.  It will provide some windfall profits for some Taiwanese fat cats in the financial services sector as PRC money floods in, but will probably do little to boost wages and employment, or get the Taiwanese economy out of its overall economic rut.

The dangers of the pact, both to Taiwanese small businesses and as a piece of ominous Trojan-horse legislation meant to enable a mainland takeover of Taiwan, have probably also been oversold. The political significance of the pact appears primarily as a continuation of the usual process of buying the loyalty of local millionaires that has been neo-capitalist China’s stock in trade ever since it ditched class struggle and showered opportunities on Li Ka Shing and other Hong Kong plutocrats in order to grease the skids for the PRC’s absorption of the British territory in 1997.

The immediate reason that the CSSTA has precipitated a political crisis in the ROC is that the main opposition party, the DPP, decided it wanted to precipitate a political crisis over the CSSTA.  The DPP, which grew out of an underground organization of Taiwan independence activists brutally suppressed by the KMT, has not quite outgrown its conspiratorial roots and is addicted to pushing the political boundaries in order to punch above its weight (the DPP-led alliance commands the loyalty of about 45% of Taiwan’s voters) and get its way. 

The dysfunctional character of the ROC’s constitution offers ample opportunities for mischief.

The Constitution of the Republic of China is not, it is safe to say, some of Sun Yatsen’s best work.  It was adequate to the task of creating a rubber-stamp legislature in a single-party state, as the ROC was for the first forty years of its tenure on Taiwan, but it is completely not up to the job of accommodating intensely adversarial partisan politics.  And to describe the relationship between the ruling KMT—born of the mainland occupation in 1949—and the DPP—which emerged from the independence struggle of Taiwanese indigenes—as adversarial is putting it mildly.

Particularly in the contentious issue of “cross strait ties” i.e. negotiating agreements between the PRC and the ROC, the powers of the Executive Yuan to unilaterally conclude agreements and the authority of the Legislative Yuan to review those agreements has not been clearly defined.  Instead, the review and approval of these agreements has been a matter of ad hoc jockeying and palavering between the “Blue” KMT-centered and “Green” DPP-centered parties.

The KMT has enough votes in the legislature (65 out of 113) to pass anything it wants to.  For the CSSTA, in order to provide a veneer of comity and consensus to the proceedings, Ma Ying-jyeou’s administration agreed to hold a series of hearings on the bill before it came to a vote.

Fatally, the inter-party negotiations were put in the hands of the speaker of the legislature, the KMT’s own Wang Jin-pyng.  Wang a native Taiwanese politician from the DPP’s southern stronghold and a failed presidential candidate, turned out to be a KINO (KMT in Name Only), and for reasons either of principle, ambition, or cussedness, concluded a generous agreement with the DPP that allowed for a series of 16 public hearings followed by a line-by-line review of the agreement in the Home Affairs Committee.

The DPP, which loathes the unilateral outreach of the KMT to the mainland and longs for a politically advantageous crisis, seized the opportunity Wang gave them to drag out the public hearings for over six months, even though the constitution stipulates that any executive order that isn’t acted on by the legislature automatically takes effect after three months.

The measure of Ma Ying-jyeou’s anger was that he orchestrated Wang’s expulsion from the KMT and removal from his speakership; an indication of the profound dysfunction of Taiwanese politics is that Wang obtained a court stay to keep his job and has been decidedly obstructionist with respect to the KMT’s desperate attempt to keep a lid on the CSSTA debate in the legislature as the process dragged on, suspicions and concerns were indefatigably advertised, and concerns of the public at large concerning the lack of transparency surrounding this rather insignificant agreement snowballed.

Matters reached their sorry climax in mid-March as the DPP attempted to take control of the Home Affairs Committee rostrum in order to set the agenda for the line-by-line review and further drag out the process.  The KMT resolved that it would draw the line with the DPP, use the three-month review stipulation to declare that the Home Affairs Committee involvement in the pact was over, and the KMT-dominated legislature could finally vote on it.

On March 17, after the usual partisan roughhousing—including a battle over control of the precious microphone that allowed remarks to be put on the record—the KMT claimed its point man had successfully seized the mike (or, the DPP alleged, a bogus mike from another meeting room since it claimed to have seized all the legitimate mikes) and announced that the pact was now in the hands of the legislature.  

The DPP responded by supporting a move by student activists to occupy the legislature. 

 

The combination of “students” and “political demonstrations” emerged to work its political and media magic once again and, to be fair, it appears that students still enjoy their special aura of perceived selflessness and moral rectitude in Taiwan, as in other parts of the world.  As the occupation dragged on, on March 30, a crowd of somewhere between 116,000 (police estimate) and 500,000 (organizers), apparently aggressively organized by the DPP but also, I expect, containing quite a few people dissatisfied with the policy dysfunction and economic failure of the Ma presidency and supportive of the students, congregated peacefully in front of the presidential building.

The irony of students occupying the legislature to block a democratic vote in the name of democracy—or for that matter, the irony of the leader of the student activists issuing ultimatums to the ROC’s elected president in the name of democracy--was lost on pretty much everybody.  

Well, almost everybody.  David Brown, a professor at Johns Hopkins and a member of the board of the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto US embassy, pointed out some of the holes in the democratic logic of this exercise in an open letter to the Nelson Report. 

 Beyond the AIT’s engrained discomfort with the DPP and the nagging fear it will upset the US-PRC diplomatic applecart with an unplanned Taiwan crisis, one might speculate that the Obama administration is not keen on establishing the precedent that its cherished Trans Pacific Pact or TPP—a lobbyist-penned giveaway to multinational corporations that, ironically (or if you’re a cynic, inevitably) recapitulates the CSSTA in its globalization lineaments, free trade principles, and need for discrete executive negotiation to keep the populist hounds at bay—might also be subjected  to the indignant scrutiny of a crowd of flower-waving, slogan-chanting students.

The DPP’s furious response to Brown came from the DPP’s representative to the United States, Joseph Wu.  

Per Focus Taiwan:

Wu said seeing the movement as a DPP election mobilization effort rather than as an extension of previous activist movements against land expropriation in Miaoli County and the controversial Fourth Nuclear Power Plant constituted "slander of the 500,000 people who took to the streets" Sunday.

Say wha?  

If the best example of KMT anti-democratic tyranny the DPP can come up with is the KMT’s studious disregard of a county government landgrab and the issue of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, the DPP is pretty much working with “intense feelings of grievance”—which it holds in abundance and can summon up on any political occasion—as opposed to “genuine grievances incapable of redress through the democratic system” to justify its anti-democratic charge.

Consider this August 2013 report on the contretemps surrounding the Fourth Nuclear Power Station, which the DPP adamantly opposes:

A parliamentary vote in Taiwan on whether to hold a referendum on the completion of the Lungmen nuclear power plant descended into a brawl between opposing parties.

The vote, proposed by the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) party, had been scheduled today in the Legislative Yuan on whether construction of Taiwan's fourth nuclear power plant, which is already nearing completion, should continue.

Some 40 lawmakers from the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) barricaded themselves inside the legislative chamber yesterday. They remained there overnight in an attempt to stop today's session, including the vote, taking place. The DPP is calling for the Lungmen plant to be scrapped without even holding a referendum.

The brawl broke out this morning as KMT lawmakers tried to take possession of the podium to allow the vote to proceed. Television footage showed two male legislators wrestling on the floor while groups from the opposing sides threw bottles and cups of water at each other.

The scuffle led to the session being suspended, without the vote on the referendum taking place. This will now be rescheduled.

The anti-nuclear DPP claims that it would be difficult to get at least 50% of the population to vote in a referendum with the majority voting against the plant's completion. The party said that it would do whatever it can to stop the referendum proceeding.

It will come as no surprise that no referendum has been scheduled.

An interesting case could be made that the DPP genuinely and accurately embodies popular will in a perfect fashion that renders conventional democratic practices moot, but it's clear that one-person one-vote democracy for its own sake is not a DPP fetish.

The hapless KMT has subsequently agreed to a line-by-line review of the pact.  Inevitably, the DPP has escalated in response to its opponent’s collywobbles (the operative phrase for taking advantage of an enemy’s helplessness, “beating a dog in the water” applies here), endorsing the students’ demands for a implementation of a new oversight mechanism for cross-straits negotiations before the review can commence.

Oversight is a nice idea in principle; in practice it compounds the institutional dysfunction of the ROC government and offers the DPP an additional venue for obstruction.  So expect the KMT and the business community to be disappointed if they believe that this concession will finally smooth the way for the anodyne CSSTA, or that the KMT will gain much political respite as it trudges toward the presidential 2016 election season.

Setting aside the questionable elements of the DPP campaign against the CSSTA, it looks like the campaign of polarization has achieved an important purpose by revealing that the KMT lacks the will, clout, and resources to overcome the resistance of a sizable minority determined to sabotage its cross-strait initiatives.

There are also some concerns that the KMT will try to fight fire with fire i.e. try to match the DPP’s advantage in confrontational street action by greenlighting a PRC-linked underworld figure, Chang An-lo, to put KMT-friendly goons on the street.  Indeed, Chang and a rent-a-mob appeared in front of the legislature on April 1 to denounce the students, but was faced down by students and a phalanx of policemen.  If the KMT has to rely on the foul-mouthed Chang An-lo, a.k.a. “White Wolf” to serve as the face of public support for the CSSTA, the KMT is in sorry straits indeed.

It is perhaps more likely that that the faction-ridden KMT, with its jello-like adaptability, will opportunistically slosh over into the “warier of the blandishments of the mainland” position instead of trying to intimidate the DPP with a mainland-friendly street presence.

Therefore, it’s unclear that the humiliation of Ma Ying-jyeou will translate into decisive broad spectrum support of the DPP, whose addiction to confrontation and crisis as a political strategy and its insistence on threatening to play the independence card many voters find disturbing.

If the DPP does gain the presidency in 2016, the PRC will be facing an interesting situation in which four of the Asian democracies—Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, and India—are committed to a policy of resisting the PRC’s eastward military and economic expansion and preferentially developing their own China-excluding economic and security order. 

Superficially, this looks like a godsend for the US pivot.  Practically, however, it would mean that the Asian democracies as a Japan-led bloc (the DPP and Japanese ultra-nationalists quietly and persistently pursue their shared anti-PRC agenda) are achieving a critical mass and the United States, instead of exercising its treasured leadership, is regarded more as a powerful but problematic asset for these nations as they chart their independent course.

In the matter of Taiwan, the ability of the United States to restrain the island’s political and diplomatic aspirations is decreasing, and the day that Taiwan declares de jure independence has probably crept a little closer.