ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys developments in identity and culture politics during Chen Shui-bian's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidency, and analyses the relationship between ethnicity, national identity and party support in twenty-first century Taiwan. It also aims at identifying the main political factors – mainly domestic, but also international – that shaped recent strategies of ethnonationalist underbidding and minority-oriented outbidding, and illustrates how these strategies influenced the direction of Taiwanization movement. At the onset of Chen Shui-bian's presidency, continuation and furtherance of Lee Teng-hui's Taiwanization programme by DPP government seemed natural and expectable. The 1990s brought rapid changes to Taiwan's incipient party system. If the creation of the DPP in the 1980s and its early evolution into a Taiwan nationalist party in the early 1990s constituted critical developments in Taiwan's incipient party system, some of the most significant changes to occur at the turn of the century concerned the Kuo Min Tang (KMT).
