ABSTRACT
The notions of the ‘Taiwan Miracle’ and the ‘Taiwan Experience’ that initially referred to economic performance, have, since the early 1990s, become associated with the much acclaimed ‘Quiet Revolution’, propagating the Kuomintang (KMT) regime’s adaptability and sustainability, and, above all, the relatively peaceful process of political transformation (Gold 1986; Cooper 1988; Hu 1994; Lee 1995, 1996). From the outset, in tandem with a flurry of social protests, when the first opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was founded in 1986 in defiance of martial law, a sense of uncertainty about possible reactions from the authoritarian party-state and the ensuing direction of political change beset society. However, when the first direct presidential election took place in March 1996, many political observers, from home and abroad, celebrated the fact that the election ‘marked the end of democratic transition’ (Higley et al. 1998), ‘democracy is taking hold in Taiwan’, and Taiwan has entered the stage of ‘democratic consolidation’ (Cooper 1995; Hood 1997; Chao and Myers 1998). Moreover, the DPP’s victory in the presidential election in March 2000 was alleged to be another decisive step in democratic consolidation since the KMT, after its rule in Taiwan for more than five decades, was replaced.
