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The year 2001 marked the tenth anniversary of Taiwan's multiparty elections. The 1990 presidential election was the last contest under the old system. The National Assembly elections of 1991 and the forced retirement of the senior parliamentarians elected in mainland China marked the beginning of democratic elections that/or the first time had the potential to bring about a change in ruling party. Ten years time passed, offering us a timely opportunity to take stock of the developments in Taiwan's party politics. This paper endeavors to tackle the following five questions: (1) What theoretical framework can be employed to test the developments of Taiwan's political parties? (2) Do Taiwan's parties emphasize issues in electoral campaigns' (3) If hey do, which issues dominate the political agenda! (4) Do Taiwan's parties differ in the issues that they stress or "own"? (5) How has party issue emphasis changed over the 1990s? The paper analyzes party change via a content analysis of newspaper advertisements for one month prior to each major election between 1991 and 2000. The coding scheme employed is a revised version of that developed by the Manifesto Research Group (MRG). The results show that, generally speaking, although candidates are heavily stressed in elections, Taiwan's parties also pay considerable attention to issues. The data is supportive of issue ownership theory, as parties stress favorable issues and ignore or treat perfunctorily unfavorable issues. There has been a degree of movement and convergence on certain issues such as Taiwan independence. On care issues, however, movement has only taken place within ideologically delimited areas, and leapfrogging on core dimensions has either not taken place or been a rare occurrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratization of minority villages in China is not conceptually distinguishable from that of Han villages probably because democratization is conceived of as a universal type of progress regardless of the country or ethnic origin of the areas under study. This paper reports on a number of interviews with local minority scholars and cadres at the township and village levels in three minority areas in China and one in Taiwan. The paper will draw a comparison among those ethnic groups. Both China and Taiwan possess a "human relational culture" while the latter is institutionally more democratic in politics and more liberal in economics than the former. The similarities among the four minority areas are significant. First of all, electoral competition is not of value in any of these ethnic villages. Integration and unity are the major concerns. Competing on the human relational front is more typical than intra-system campaigning. The anxiety over loss of social control is a built-in element, rather than a constraint, of democracy. The family and kinship organizations "are by far the most influential factors in election-related discourse. Even though people no longer blindly follow the family position on an issue, the repeated reference to "unity" or "consensus" implies a worldview where the meaning of life begins in the family, the tribe, and the kinship level instead of the individual. Electoral politics has not yet changed the fundamental thinking on the priority of the collective over the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The PRC-Taiwan diplomatic rivalry has not spared the South Pacific islands, a region only rarely mentioned within a Western strategy for Asia. This paper argues that the PRC and Taiwan have, since the 1970s, become players in their own right in Oceania, raising new variables in an uneventful area. Beijing and Taipei have made energetic efforts out of all proportion to draw such tiny islands to either camp. The elusive reasons are dissected herein. Wary of Western hegemony, the region's leaders have turned to Asia for offers of trade and aid, and have played the PRC and Taiwan against each other. This paper seeks to: explain Beijing's and Taipei's goals in lands that yield seemingly negligible gains; show how such activism has impacted Oceania; determine the region's perceptions and reactions; portray the relative position of all players; and point out future problems. The study is divided into contentious points crystallized over time: Cold War decolonization and the Chinese/Taiwanese arrival; aid, trade, and investment; fishing disputes; the role of China's navy; the region's nuclear-free zone; UN and South Pacific Forum dialogues; and the region's social economic, environmental ethnic, and security concerns. The study concludes that the supremacy of Chinese and Taiwanese global commercial considerations aims to demand a specific institutional-geopolitical alignment in Oceania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A general theory of strategy allows scholars to explain or predict national strategies based on certain stable social characteristics. The interactions between national values and national strategy is tested here on a case study of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan. The first part of the paper concerns itself with the identification of the ROC's national values. Taiwanese society is deemed to have materialism and individualism as national values. Accordingly, the theory predicts that Taiwan will adopt a direct strategy of action. An examination of the historical record of the ROC on Taiwan under the process of de-Chiangization takes up the first part of the paper. The second half of the paper concerns itself with empirical investigation of the hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an institutional account of how President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan has sent important messages across the Taiwan Strait. Under Taiwan's constitutional system, the parliament can neither hold the president accountable for what he says nor sack the premier appointed by the president, while a president who lacks legislative support also finds it hard to put his policy goals into practice. These problems give President Chen the excuse to set up extra-constitutional channels to deliver pro-independence messages, some of which go against his official pledges. Here, a collection of Chen's important remarks directed across the Taiwan Strait are analyzed, and a consistent pattern is revealed of when and where he is likely to say what. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a historical overview and theoretical interpretation of the issue of national identity in Taiwan. The author demonstrates how the idea of "orthodoxy" in the dynastic tradition has shaped various projects of Chinese nationalism in the twentieth century. Taiwan has surpassed this dynastic mind-set by transforming cultural nationalism into civic nationalism. Taiwan's new political order, which is centered on popular elections of the president, is interpreted as the institutionalization of plebiscites which has forged a new national identity. Theoretical reflection on the relationship between the civic nationalism of Taiwan and tile cultural nationalism of China is also provided. The author contends that a mode of heterocentric self-understanding is needed to resolve the ideological conflict between China and Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwan has had to conduct a foreign economic policy (FEP) within a constricted international space given the island's "contested statehood" predicament. While the dynamic nature of Taiwan's newly industrialized economic development and the government's "resourceful" economic diplomacy strategies have provided Taipei with increasing room for FEP maneuvers, the "mainland China" factor continues to loom large. This paper contends that the People's Republic of China (PRC) exerts orientating gravitational forces upon Taiwan's FEP that are growing in strength. These forces comprise two main aspects. The first concerns the gravitational pull of the PRC economy upon Taiwan's economy that centers on the burgeoning growth of cross-Strait commerce and the ever more palpable transnational economic space this interaction is creating. Here, Taipei must primarily weigh the risks and benefits of further economic integration with mainland China. The second aspect relates to the domain of economic diplomacy, where Taiwan must navigate in a wider international economic system in which the PRC is exerting increasingly powerful economic and political gravitational forces. Discussion on this broad issue is examined in the context of Taiwan's pursuit of economic security in the international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's success in achieving economic growth has created speculation that China will become a great power in the twenty-first century. The rise of China is particularly alarming given the resurgence of Chinese nationalism that is occurring, in the People's Republic of China (PRC) today. How should we interpret the rise of China? What are the implications of nationalist appeals on Beijing's policy of national reunification with Taiwan? Moreover, has the rise of nationalism made Beijing's international behavior more aggressive? These are important questions. Using a case study of the recent changes in Beijing's Taiwan policy, this paper argues that the rise of nationalism does not necessarily make China a threat to the international community because nationalism has not driven China into taking irrational action against Taiwan. Despite nationalist rhetoric, Beijing's policy of national reunification has not been particularly inflexible Although Beijing has intermittently used the strategy of military coercion and peaceful offense, nationalism has not prevented Beijing's pragmatic leadership from adopting peaceful offense as the most desirable approach for national reunification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the development of cross-Strait trade relations since 1978. Before the mid-1980s, relations were mainly initiated by Beijing; afterwards, changes in both domestic and international economic conditions forced Taipei to take a more active role in the two-way trade. Nevertheless, both the Taipei government and scholars have urged local enterprises to cooperate with those of other countries for investment in mainland China to avoid political risks during the current uncertainties in cross-Strait relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]