OPINION:
March 23 is the 30th anniversary of a historical first: Lee Tung-hui’s ballot box selection as president of Taiwan, more formally known as the Republic of China. It marked the first direct popular election of a Chinese head of state.
Since 1996, Taiwan has held seven presidential elections and witnessed three peaceful transfers of power between parties — a hallmark of constitutional stability. Five have been won by the Democratic Progressive Party, a party once proscribed as illegal during the authoritarian period of martial law that the then-Kuomintang government had imposed after losing mainland China to the communists in 1949, not fully lifted until1987.
Beyond a victory for the people of Taiwan, these elections also demonstrate that Chinese democracy is more than the name of an album by Guns N’ Roses and that there is an alternative model to the communist system that governs the People’s Republic of China.
As a democracy rooted in Chinese culture, the existence of Taiwan directly rebuts a contention put forward in a tract that circulated among the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 — coinciding with Xi Jinping’s rise to power — known colloquially as “Document Number 9” or, more lugubriously, as “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere.”
Document Number 9 sees constitutional governance, multi-party democracy and general elections as “Western” threats.
Taiwan’s constitutional democracy does indeed draw upon Western sources, but from the Chinese tradition as well — from roots that date back at least to the Confucian thinker Mencius, whose proto-democratic ideas circulated four centuries before Christ and proclaimed that in the hierarchy of proper governance the people come first and the emperor last.
Taiwan’s constitution is properly understood as that of the ROC, an inheritance that the vanquished Kuomintang brought with them from the mainland. In addition to the three branches of government familiar to Americans — with the caveat that the president acts as head of state, while an executive branch premier appointed by the president and answerable to the legislature functions as head of government—the ROC’s constitution adds two more, an examination branch (or yuan) and a control branch.
ROC founder Sun Yat-sen discerned that even in the imperial period, China had an unwritten constitutionalism with institutional checks and balances. A meritocratic mandarin caste schooled in virtue-based Confucian classics whose positions depended on passing a rigorous examination ran the imperial bureaucracy, serving as a de facto brake on the power of the emperor.
The examination and control branches, reflecting this traditional check-and-balance role, were codified in the current constitution, drafted in 1947 when the ROC still governed mainland China.
This does not mean that the five-branch model is free from strains; reforms introduced in the 1990s lessened the oversight function of the Control Yuan without granting concomitant power to the legislative branch. With the Democratic Progressive Party now controlling the presidency and the Kuomintang the legislature, divided government has often brought paralysis — most notably over the defense budget— one of the awkwardly glorious necessary realities of constitutional checks and balances as familiar to Washington as it is to Taipei.
Nonetheless, Taiwanese critics from both major parties who seek to do away with the control and examination branches and adopt a wholly Western tripartite model miss an important nuance of the unique five-branch structure: These branches, rooted in an unwritten constitutionalism present in imperial China, rebut the CCP claim that constitutionalism is a western imposition.
One final note: Taiwan’s Lai Ching-te is truly a president (zongtong), with all the legitimacy a democratic mandate entails. Western media does a disservice when it gratuitously bestows the title of “president” on Mr. Xi, for that is not his title in Chinese. In his state capacity, he is “chairman” (zhuxi), a ceremonial role.
His power, however, comes from his being general secretary of the Communist Party (zongshuji) a centralized, non-democratic Leninist institution.
Calling Communist Party General Secretary Xi “president” normalizes a regime that threatens not only Taiwan’s plucky democracy, but also America’s global leadership. It also does a disservice to the memory of Lee Tung-hui, the first head of a Chinese state to earn a title bestowed by the people — president of the republic.
• Piero A. Tozzi is senior director of China policy at the America First Policy Institute.
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