How Taiwan’s Authoritarian Past Shapes Its Security Politics Today

On February 28, 1947, the Kuomintang (KMT) government led by Chiang Kai-shek launched a harsh crackdown in Taiwan by indiscriminately gunning down protesters. On that fateful day, protesters had gathered to denounce two years of chaos and corruption under the KMT after the Allies had handed Taiwan back to China. The violent crackdown, known as the 228 Massacre, cost thousands of lives and ushered in a period known as the White Terror. 

The legacy of Chiang’s dictatorship continues to shape the island’s polarized society and security policies today.

At the most recent annual memorial of the 228 Massacre in Memorial Park, the guest of honor was Chiang Wan-an, the young KMT mayor of Taipei and the alleged (illegitimate) great-grandson of Chiang Kai-shek. Ma Ying-jeou, 70, the KMT president from 2008 to 2016, led the procession hand in hand with a survivor of the killings, and laid a wreath both at the start and end of the ceremony.

Chiang Wan-an, 45, apologized to the family members of the victims who sat before him for his speech, framing those massacred as “our elders” who needed to be remembered, instead of reflecting on his family’s and party’s role as perpetrators.

The bitter irony of the ceremony being led by two leading KMT members was not lost on a group of young protesters. A vast police presence prevented them from storming the altar as they had done the previous year, but the message on their paper sheets was unchanged: “There is no solution for the matter, forgiveness is impossible.” “The matter” was written in Taiwanese rather than Mandarin, underscoring that they spoke for the generations of Taiwanese who had lived on the island before the KMT takeover.

Martial law under the KMT only ended in 1987 amid a wave of democratizations in the region, paving the way for the first direct parliamentary elections in 1992 and the first direct presidential elections in 1996. The Tangwai, or “outside the party” movement, propelled this change and emerged in 1986 as the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has held Taiwan’s presidency since 2016. Over the last eight years, the DPP has moved toward delivering transitional justice, albeit incrementally.

A Present Past

It is surprising that the KMT remains one of the two major political parties in Taiwan. It is as if Francisco Franco’s Movimiento Nacional, abolished in 1977, was still a viable player in Spanish politics today. By voluntarily opening up the political system, the KMT managed “to have a democratic second life,” said Professor Ming-sho Ho of National Taiwan University.

At a more fundamental level, the battle over historical memory on display at the remembrance ceremony reflects different conceptions of identity. Many KMT supporters seem to live in the past – an era in which the Republic of China (ROC), as Taiwan is still officially called, was on standby, ready one day to take back the mainland from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

It is in this period that the notion of one undivided China encompassing both sides of the Taiwan Strait is anchored, a notion still held by the KMT but disputed by the DPP, which views the island as already being an independent and sovereign state.

The descendants of the million Chinese who fled the mainland with Chiang Kai-shek form much of the KMT base. Known as waishengren, literally “outside province person,” they are the children and grandchildren of the soldiers, police officers, bureaucrats, and teachers who were regime loyalists. Only in the 1990s were the people in these professions not “encouraged” to join the party. 

Hou Yu-ih, 67, the mayor of New Taipei, effectively the greater metropolitan region of the capital, and the KMT candidate for the January 2024 presidential elections, started his long career in the police force in the last decade of the dictatorship. The base, however, wasn’t happy with Hou because, in the end, he is Taiwanese. He was born to parents who lived in Taiwan before 1945 and so is not considered a waishengren. 

That’s why Jaw Shaw-kong, 73, whose father fought the communists on the mainland in the KMT army, was selected as the party’s candidate for vice president. Hou sought to keep his distance from the old guard of One China believers in the party but Jaw, an old KMT stalwart with impeccable nationalist credentials, was still calling for reunification with China in the early 1990s – under Taipei.

The argument of the “Deep Blue” supporters, so called after the KMT’s colors, is that people on both sides of the strait are at their core racially and culturally the same. This line of thought implies, as does China, that resisting unification with the zuguo, or ancestral land, makes no sense. This belief among older generations is unsurprising given that the government instilled the notion in the population until the 1980s.

The One China narrative has a direct impact on policy preferences. In 2022, Jaw was part of the legion of DPP antagonists that derided the progressives’ attempt to strengthen Taiwan’s defense against China. He questioned the usefulness of President Tsai Ing-wen’s signature defense reform to extend military service from four to 12 months, asking: “Is it just like Ukraine, with just a few more days of delay and many more deaths?”

Hou more recently went as far as calling the January elections a choice between war and peace, making it the main topic of debate in the campaign. 

The broader narrative that the United States cannot be trusted to come to the island’s aid – “abandoning [Taiwan] once again,” as one KMT academic put it – plays neatly into the hands of mainland disinformation pushing the idea that Taiwan, as Ma echoed right before the elections, could never win a war with powerful China.

The DPP serving as the pro-military party is a remarkable reversal of positions. It was born out of the anti-militarist movement, after all. Yet it was Tsai, dressed in military fatigues for drills, who led the charge to increase war-readiness as the regional balance of power changed drastically.

Taiwan still had air superiority until the late 1990s and Japan until a decade later, but Beijing has had the upper hand militarily for at least the last decade and a half, both qualitatively and quantitatively. 

Pivotal Choices

Taiwan’s security policy has not been spared entanglement in the DPP-KMT divide. With pivotal defense choices needed in the next four to eight years, this is a significant vulnerability. 

Few examples illustrate the furious contestation over defense policy better than Taiwan’s indigenous submarine project. Slated to cost $16 billion over a decade, or about 85 percent of the 2024 defense budget, it will produce eight diesel-powered vessels. 

It may be an appealing trump card on paper, but according to a former Pentagon official involved in defense procurement for Taiwan the submarine is based on 50-year-old technology. An untested design, the submarines have no air-independent propulsion (AIP) and no pump jet, making them easier to track. 

As such, there are legitimate reasons to ask whether the secretive program is indeed a DPP vanity project, as the KMT has portrayed it. The opposition party has vowed to delve into allegations of misspending and has proposed new investigative powers to do so. The DPP lost its majority in the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament, in January’s elections. 

The dispute over Taiwan’s submarine program is part of a broader debate about the direction Taiwan’s military strategy should take. Should it sustain its traditional posture, trying to counter China with comparable assets – ships, planes, and tanks – or should it opt for the “porcupine strategy,” which seeks to turn the island into an impenetrable fortress full of mobile and shoulder-launched anti-vessel and anti-aircraft missiles.

Taiwan’s 2023 Defense Report, issued by the Ministry of National Defense, reflected the conundrum by failing to make a clear choice. It was full of references to the porcupine strategy, but at the same time referred, unrealistically, to “joint sea control” and listed desired purchases of F-16s and Abrams tanks.

Given China’s overwhelming firepower, these assets would be taken out within the first hours of engagement, according to Bonnie Glaser of the German Marshall Fund. 

When I asked the incoming vice president, Hsiao Bi-khim, whether there was still disagreement about Taiwan’s military strategy and procurement, she told me that was “old news,” and that the island would take the asymmetric route.

One retired general suggested the military leadership thought differently. Presented with Hsiao’s quote, he retorted: “They are just politicians, they don’t understand the military.” A KMT foreign affairs observer also spoke of a rift. “All high-ranking officers have doubts,” he said. “The DPP gets a lot of pushback not to abandon traditional defense.” 

Lamenting the DPP’s dismissal of dissenting voices, he added: “They call them Chiang Kai-shek’s army, trained by the KMT. They get no respect, no honor.”

Taiwan’s most senior generals do hail from the Chiang dictatorship, and they are steeped in the idea of attacking China rather than defending against it. The father of the asymmetric doctrine and chief of the general staff from 2017 to 2019, Lee Hsi-ming, is tellingly now persona non grata at the defense ministry. 

The KMT’s Burden

The problem for the KMT is the opposite: its close affiliation with the old guard risks putting the party out of touch with the emerging Taiwanese identity. 

“We still do not appeal to the young generation,” a political assistant to the KMT’s chair, Eric Chu, told me. “Only three to five percent of the electorate is Deep Blue, pro-China, but they account for nearly half of the KMT membership.” 

Chu has led a major revamp of the party to attract more young people into its ranks. His main reform has been to break the power of the retired military officers who have traditionally dominated the party. They long operated independently as their own central branch, with their own funding and intra-party channels. The chapter, called Huang Fuxing, has been brought under the authority of local city branches, which will allow for the selection of candidates with broader appeal to the run for the 2028 presidential and parliamentary elections.

However, it remains to be seen whether Chu’s reforms will go far enough to overcome other obstacles to young people joining the KMT. In the words of Johnny Chiang, the party’s leader in the Legislative Yuan: “We’re too old. The party is too old … Compared with the other two major parties, which have their origins in Taiwan, the KMT has a very long and complicated history, and that is sometimes a burden.”

A KMT staffer who hosted the party’s regular happy hour for the foreign press was more blunt. “It’s easier to come out as gay than as a KMT member,” she said.

Much of the apprehension among younger voters comes together in the very name of the party. The KMT’s official name is still the Chinese Nationalist Party, implying, as did Chu’s political assistant, that it serves all huaren, the people of the Chinese ancestral land. 

And there is a powerful faction in the KMT centered around former President Ma that wants to keep it that way. Its regular interventions in the public discourse on cross-strait relations and Chinese/Taiwanese identity, and those of commentators on outlets such as ChinaTimes and TVBS that share its viewpoint, prevent the party from moving forward. 

A costly case in point was Hou feeling compelled, three days before the election, to publicly reject Ma’s remarks about Taiwan not standing a chance against China. Ma later met Xi Jinping for an audience at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on April 10.

The Bold Newcomer

The main battleground for the youth vote is the digital realm, on messaging apps such as LINE and WeChat, and video-sharing platforms such as TikTok and YouTube.

The newcomer in parliament, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), jumped in the polls in the last weeks before the elections thanks to anti-establishment messages and funny clips of its populist candidate, Ko Wen-je, that were widely shared online.

As KMT legislative candidate Wennie Wu put it: “Taiwanese people love scandal and gossip, and algorithms give you what you like. We’re just not seen as cool, so it is really hard for us to get to the youth.

“The running joke among us is that we’re the army party while they excel in the air war,” she said, referring to the KMT’s Mao-inspired grassroots approach versus the TPP’s online strategy.

Without much of a set policy agenda, the TPP won eight out of 113 seats in Taiwan’s legislature, mostly on the persona of Ko. With the KMT and DPP holding 52 and 51 seats, respectively, the TPP could be decisive in passing a DPP-proposed defense budget and readiness reforms. 

A Clean Break?

Since Chu took the reins at the KMT two and a half years ago, a host of new entities have been rolled out to rejuvenate the party and broaden its appeal. There is now a Youth League, a Department of Youth, a Youth Working Group, KMT Studio, a New Media Department and, just before the elections, the launch of KMT Girls.

Such image-building efforts, though, are largely cosmetic and unlikely on their own to excite youngsters about a party that projects itself as center-right conservative. A clean break is needed. 

Typical members with a pro-China worldview, such as the legislator Wu Sz-huai, are in their 70s and will have died out in a decade or two. If the KMT wants to retain its position as one of Taiwan’s main political parties, more fundamental measures are needed in the socio-historical and identity realm. 

As Brian Hioe, one of the protesters in the Sunflower Movement a decade ago, wrote on the movement’s 10th anniversary in March: “The same fundamental issues that the movement addressed – that of Taiwan’s ambiguous position in the world and the future of its people – are still unresolved.”