ABSTRACT
When Tsai Ing-wen and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) swept to victory in Taiwan’s presidential and legislative elections in 2016, it marked a significant turning point in Taiwan’s politics. Taiwan’s democracy reached another milestone of consolidation, producing the third peaceful transfer of the presidency across party lines and giving the DPP a parliamentary majority for the first time. Four years later, Tsai won a second term with a similar margin, and the DPP retained its legislative majority. This followed a campaign in which Tsai and the DPP benefited from the opposition Kuomintang’s deep-rooted difficulties and from their own ability to draw contrasts between Taiwan’s robust liberal democracy and the crisis in Hong Kong, where the “one country, two systems” model that China insists must apply to Taiwan was unraveling amid mass protests and Beijing-backed repressive measures. Tsai’s government has undertaken significant policy initiatives, some effecting significant change, in Taiwan’s domestic economy and international economic engagements, defense policy, external relations, and cultural policy. Yet, broad and deep forces favoring continuity, for good and for ill, limit the potential for change, and much of the energy of the government is inevitably directed toward managing difficult challenges, old and new, at home and abroad.
