ABSTRACT
As far as the relationship between democratisation and national identity was concerned, the Second National Assembly elections were to show that popular support for the KMT and the Lee Teng-hui presidency could be maintained when the one-China principle was interpreted flexibly enough to allow constitutional reform to proceed. The longer-term cost of this, however, was to be growing antagonism from those within the KMT who still clung to Chinese nationalism and became dissatisfied as the rhetoric of ‘one China’ proved increasingly ambiguous. Underlying this ambiguity was the unavoidable fact that if sovereignty was to be practised by the residents of Taiwan, then it manifestly did not lie with the Chinese nation. As electoral politics led Lee Teng-hui to follow through the implications of the developing political dispensation, he faced increasing calls from all sides for a clarification of the relationship between the state on Taiwan, the population of the island, and the Chinese nation. The resulting interaction between reform, the constraints of the one-China principle and the need for new initiatives in mainland and foreign policies brought a search for a new definition of the relationship between Chinese identity and the state in Taiwan. As the reforms came to a conclusion with the 1996 presidential election, the limits of flexibility became increasingly salient.
