In this episode of Roughly Chinese Pod, our host Mimi sits down with Zhong Xiangyu—Taiwan compatriot, reunification advocate, and geopolitical commentator—to explore the complex reality of Taiwan’s political landscape that Western observers often misunderstand.

To enhance readability and flow, our editorial team has lightly adapted and polished the transcript. Below is the full conversation.

Zhong Xiangyu:
The party that most people in the audience will probably be familiar with is the Guomindang, or the KMT. Today, I would say they are a party that advocates pragmatic relations with both Beijing and Washington.

I think it’s really funny, because Taiwan separatists like to frame them as proxies of the CPC, while many pro-China Westerners talk about them as if the Chinese Civil War is still actively going on and the KMT remains the number one enemy of the CPC. Neither of these views are true.

The other major party is the Democratic Progressive Party, or the DPP. This is the incumbent party, which originally rose out of the liberal opposition movement against the KMT back during the era of martial law. Today they’re known as a separatist or so-called Taiwan independence–leaning party. But if you can believe it, that wasn’t always the case. Their original goal was to establish a liberal democracy in Taiwan—end martial law, secure freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and all of that.

By the 1990s, they had achieved much of this rather quickly. To differentiate themselves from the KMT, they began adopting Taiwan separatist rhetoric, exploiting the social contradictions within Taiwanese society.

From the mid-1940s until the late 1980s—and I’d say into the early 1990s—Taiwan was under martial law. Democracy beyond the city and county levels was suspended. A so-called National Assembly, elected in 1948 on the mainland, was relocated to Taiwan in 1949. Because democracy was suspended, this Assembly remained unchanged until 1991, aside from new representatives replacing those who died.

So, from the 1940s until 1991, Taiwan was governed mostly by elites from the Chinese mainland who were out of touch with the people on Taiwan. Keep in mind that Taiwan had become a Japanese colony in 1895 and was only returned to China in 1945. That’s fifty years of separation. Between 1945 and 1949, you also had the 228 Incident and the civil war raging on the mainland. The new central government had little time to reintegrate Taiwan before the Civil War split China again.

Meanwhile, the modern Chinese identity had been developed on the mainland during the early 20th century. In earlier times, people primarily identified with families, clans, or villages rather than the nation itself.

While the DPP had legitimate grievances against the KMT, democratization also offered local Taiwanese elites—who had long felt sidelined—a chance to break the KMT’s monopoly over power and work their way into government. Most of both groups, the local Taiwanese and the post-1949 arrivals, were poor. But the elites of both groups were minorities.

The locals, called benshengren (“people of this province”), were those whose families arrived in Taiwan during the Ming and Qing dynasties. They formed the majority of the population and had grievances against the government. It was easy to appeal to them by saying: “Look, the KMT wasn’t kind to you because they’re outsiders. But we are from Taiwan, we understand you, so vote for us.” This was a major strategy for how the DPP originally gained support.

Taiwan separatism, once a fringe ideology, became part of the DPP’s political package. Over the past few decades, the DPP has gone through several ideological makeovers. Starting in the 2010s, it increasingly adopted positions associated with Western leftism. Instead of focusing on divides between benshengren and waishengren, which have blurred over time, the DPP shifted toward presenting itself as the defender of Taiwan against China. Importantly, they say “China,” not “the Chinese mainland,” a deliberate choice to encourage people to think of Taiwan and the mainland as two separate countries.

The DPP first won the presidency in 2000 and again in 2004. The KMT returned to power in 2008 and held it until 2016, when the DPP once again won both the presidency and a majority in the legislature.

During the eight years of Tsai Ing-wen’s leadership, however, there weren’t many policy successes. Much of her tenure was centered on promoting Taiwan pride. Naturally, support for the DPP dwindled. Still, Lai Ching-te won the presidency, mainly for two reasons: the KMT failed to produce a strong candidate, and a new third party emerged—the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), founded by former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je, who also ran in the 2024 election.

Lai Ching-te ended up winning with 40 percent of the vote, while 60 percent was split between the TPP’s Ko Wen-je and the KMT’s Hou You-yi. If you count abstentions, Lai actually won with less than 30 percent of the vote. So he was by no means a popular leader; he entered office already unpopular.

Now this is where the drama begins. The legislature has 113 seats. The DPP won 51, the KMT 52, and there are two independents leaning KMT, bringing them effectively to 54. The TPP secured the remaining eight. While eight doesn’t sound like much, neither 51 nor 54 reaches the majority threshold of 57. That means the TPP held the tie-breaking power.

At first, the TPP sought to remain neutral, positioning itself as a viable third party. When it came time to elect the speaker of the legislature, the DPP’s 51 legislators supported Ke Jian-ming, while the KMT and its allies supported Han Guo-yu. If the TPP ran its own candidate, it would effectively hand victory to the KMT. The only way the DPP could win was if the TPP voted for its candidate.

The TPP, however, chose to run its own candidate symbolically, to assert independence. As a result, the KMT’s candidate won the speakership. The DPP then denounced the TPP as “anti-democratic traitors” and mobilized protests, launching what came to be called the Qingniao (Bluebird) movement. The character qing can mean either blue or green in Chinese, but in English it became “Bluebird.”

This pushed the TPP and KMT closer together. With the two aligned, the legislature fell firmly under opposition control. In a normal liberal democracy, the governing party would compromise with the opposition, govern effectively, and prepare for the next election with stronger candidates. Instead, under Lai Ching-te, the DPP launched mass recalls targeting every non-DPP legislator it could.

While framed as democratic, the recall mechanism is skewed. To become a legislator, you need a majority of votes. But to recall one, once enough signatures are collected, only 25 percent of voters in that district need to support the recall. If votes in favor are not outnumbered by votes against, the recall passes. This essentially overturns the popular will with just a quarter of the electorate.

So, they launched these recalls. It’s as if Donald Trump tried to recall all Democrats in Congress. Recalls are meant for individual cases of poor performance, not mass partisan purges. Such an effort required central coordination, but they insisted it was grassroots.

Voters grew tired of this. On July 26th, of the 24 legislators up for recall, absolutely none were recalled. Zero. There was also one TPP mayor, in Xinzhu, but she too survived. By August 23rd, it was obvious the recalls would fail, and even betting markets stopped taking bets.

In the end, the attempt backfired. Rather than consolidating power, Lai Ching-te ended up in a weaker position than ever before.
Mimi:
Yeah, I mean, it seems like he’s quite good at that. Thank you so much for so thoroughly breaking down the history of the parties and all the drama. There really does seem to be a lot of drama—and also a lot of very cunning strategies to gain power that, as you said, constantly backfire.

Editor: Charriot Zhai