The DPP’s China policy before and during the Ma Ying-jiu era

This chapter looks back at the DPP’s China policy since the party was established in 1986, and traces policy changes during the Ma Ying-jiu era, particularly after Tsai Ing-wen’s election defeat in 2012, when she tried to focus on domestic issues and invoked an abstract ‘Taiwan consensus’ as a substitute for a clear-cut approach to China. The conceptual basis of the DPP’s China policy has not changed since the party’s 1999 Resolution on Taiwan’s Future. Striving for an ‘independent’ Taiwan on the one hand, and pragmatically accepting the ‘Republic of China’ as the official signifier of a sovereign Taiwanese state on the other, have remained solid pillars of the DPP’s China policy edifice, despite isolated and futile attempts from within the party to scrap the ‘independence clause’. While Ma Ying-jiu was able to marginalize the DPP in 2008 and to win a convincing mandate in 2012 with an agenda that was focused on cross-Strait rapprochement and continuing economic integration, his party failed miserably in 2016. Generational change and national identity formation, as Schubert argues, had undergirded a process of accelerating alienation between the pro-Chinese KMT government and Taiwan’s youth, a process that culminated in the 2014 Sunflower Movement.