Judul : princeton center for yoga and health
link : princeton center for yoga and health
princeton center for yoga and health
- good evening, and welcome to the marian miner cook athenaeum. my name is sarah sanbar, and i'm one of the ath fellows this year. china and taiwan have a long and fraught history,
princeton center for yoga and health, and to this day, there is serious debate on whether the island of taiwan should become unified with the territories of mainland china under the rule of the republic of china,
become unified with the territories of mainland china under the rule of the people's republic of china, or declare independence to become the republic of taiwan. yet as economic relations between china and taiwan deepen and taiwanese become increasingly dissatisfied with mainland china's response to movements in hong kong, there has been a rise in taiwanese identity and a backlash against the effects of globalization. there are few in a position better equipped
to understand such dynamics than professor shirley lin. formerly a partner at goldman sachs, where she was responsible for private equity and venture capital investments in asia, she now teaches political science at the university of virginia. she is a member of the founding faculty of the master's program in global political economy at the chinese university of hong kong,
and sits on several boards, including goldman sachs asia bank, langham hospitality investments, and mercuries life insurance. her most recent book, taiwan's china dilemma, contested identities and multiple interests in taiwan's cross-strait economic policy, explores how, as taiwan has become increasingly dependent
on mainland china economically, its policies towards china have fluctuated between liberalization and restriction. professor lin's athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the keck center for international and strategic studies at cmc. as always, i must remind you that audio and visual recording is strictly prohibited. please join me in welcoming professor lin.
(audience applauding) (whispering) - thank you, sarah, for that very generous introduction. and i'm reminded that i am privileged to be here today by the dinner i just had, with the students at my table asking very pointed questions and already putting me on guard
as to the q and a after this talk. so i'm looking forward to the question and answers, and therefore, i'll keep my remarks very brief. and in fact, professor pei minxin, who is my classmate at harvard, so generously invited me to cmc after i actually was desperate for an invitation. of all the places, i think that the greater los angeles area
is one of the most exciting places to talk about cross-strait relations, because of the strong connection between here and asia pacific and the mass amount of chinese investments that have come into the area, i think makes the question that i'm addressing very relevant to most of you, whether you're involved with taiwan or china today.
so let me first address sort of why this book. for decades after 1949, both the governments of taiwan and the people's republic of china were committed to eventual unification of taiwan with the rest of china. but the conditions for this commitment have fundamentally changed over the past two to three decades,
as more and more people in taiwan now consider themselves taiwanese and non-chinese, and increasingly, they have embraced civic values largely absent in the people's republic of china. can this identity shift in taiwan be reversed and the hope of eventual unification restored? can america's longstanding policy of dual deterrence be maintained, or does it have to revise its policy in light of these fundamental changes?
and very fortunately, i was at the table with sarah, whose family actually came from the middle east, and i just actually visited israel and the palestine, and it's very interesting, because in 1989, 52% of taiwanese considered themselves chinese and nothing but chinese. in 30 years, this has changed
so that majority of taiwanese believe they are taiwanese and nothing but taiwanese. and this change is dramatic when you compare it to other countries with a divided sense of national identity. before taiwan's democratization in the late '80s, culture affinity and a common objective of one china made eventual unification a feasible goal. in fact, it is what both beijing and taipei had wanted.
a majority of the people thought they were chinese, and the two economies were highly complementary. on this basis, economic relations across the strait exploded. it didn't just grow gradually. it exploded. and the u.s. could state that on this basis, economic relations allowed the u.s. to state that it would accept the eventual unification
of taiwan and china as long as the process was peaceful. and it looked like it was an issue that would be resolved eventually. however, taiwan's economic policy toward the prc oscillated. first, in 1996, president lee teng-hui initiated a policy called new no haste, and he, it was right after his visit to his alma mater, cornell university,
that prompted the missile crisis, and beijing decided to lob missiles at taiwan, and president lee teng-hui then decided to put up barriers for taiwanese companies to invest in china, and this was widely supported. then, chen shui-bian, who was the first democratic progressive party president of taiwan, became president.
he realized he didn't have the support of business communities, so he decided to reverse this policy, and instituted something called active opening, which allowed taiwanese companies to invest in china more than ever, and especially was significant in opening up strategic investments, such as semiconductor businesses.
and this was met, this was also, he faced great opposition, and students and teachers alike went on the street to oppose his active liberalization of economic relations with china. during these two episodes, identity was very polarized, and this led to emotional debates
over extreme economic policies, and support for protectionism was associated with a taiwanese identity, and support for liberalization was associated with a chinese identity or support for eventual unification. now as taiwanese became consolidated, the debate over cross-strait policy changed. i wanted to show you,
in order to illustrate this shift in national identity, i want to show you two slides. the first slide shows you how taiwanese have changed their self-identification. so as i said, in 1989, it was even more extreme, but this study is one that is the most reliable by national chengchi university's election study center. you can see in 1992
an equal number of people thought they were taiwanese as those who thought they were chinese, and majority just said they were both. actually, not a majority, slightly less than majority. most people said no response, because after many decades of authoritarian regime governance, most people were uncomfortable answering polls,
and i think today, a week after the presidential election, we understand how important accurate polls are. and in taiwan, i was addressing my table, it is actually quite accurate. today, the reason studying taiwan is so fascinating, in addition to it being one of the most important hotspots in the world,
is that there are polls in taiwan about everything. whether people like eating oranges versus apples, whether young people want to live and work in china versus live and work in a lower-paying job in southern taiwan. you can find polls about everything. and so here you see, over time, the percentage of people who believe they are taiwanese
or both taiwanese and chinese have increased so much. it's now well over 90% for seven years in a row. and this only ends in 2014, which is when my book ended, but in fact, 2015 and '16, this trend has continued further. and those who think they are chinese has now dropped as of 2016 august to 3.5%. why is this important?
because this is the number beijing looks at. they are looking at the percentage of people who identify themselves as only chinese, and this has been, obviously, a very disappointing result. the second slide i want to show you in relations to national identity is what taiwanese call preferred future national status. this is an important way to measure identity for taiwanese,
because it asks you basically if you support unification now or later, independence now or later, autonomy forever, or for the time being. and you can see that, again, i chart, i divide the responses into two groups because of what beijing is most focused on. beijing would like to see the bottom line grow,
which is the percentage of people who support unification now or later, and that percentage has dropped from 20% to less than 10%. but more alarming than this is those who vote for unification immediately is only 1.5%. why is that important? because the percentage of people who vote for independence, ah, independence, unification immediately means those who want
to unify taiwan and china under the communist party, and that is now very low. and this is also very disappointing. why is this disappointing? because taiwan and china's trade now has, both trade and investment volume have now exceeded $150 billion, and 2/3 of taiwan's foreign direct investment goes to china.
china is taiwan's most important trading partner, most important investment base, and yet, after all these economic benefits were doled out to the taiwanese, this is the result you get. so what is wrong? i want to come back to taiwan's economic policy, because as i said before, in the early days after democratization,
taiwanese went through two periods of extreme policy change, from no haste to active opening in 2001. and what happened as national identity consolidated after 2006, chen shui-bian started to change his mind, because he was under great personal scandal. and therefore, he decided to appeal to the base and change taiwan's economic policy toward china to be more restrictive,
and he changed the active opening policy in 2001 to active management, which meant he was going to regulate investments in china more and monitor those companies more. and this was met with great resistance, because at this point, taiwanese said, well, majority of us are taiwanese. so whether you're taiwanese or not does not differentiate you in terms of your support
for a certain kind of economic policy. and the discussion about chen shui-bian's economic policy became much more rational and focused on economic logic. in fact, by 2010, the economic cooperation framework agreement was signed between china and taiwan under president ma ying-jeou of the kuomintang, or the nationalist party, which came back to power in 2008.
and ma ying-jeou was able to actually have a 72% support for the ecfa, which is a two-way liberalization policy between taiwan and china that was to give taiwan a lot of benefit for both trade and investment. and as a result of a consolidating national identity, actually, taiwanese became overwhelmingly in support of the ecfa. they wanted more trade,
more investment with china, even though they were less inclined to support unification. now this is the dilemma that we are addressing today, because taiwan needs to face the fact that china is its most important partner, and relying on taiwan for growth could strength taiwan's economy, and make taiwan more competitive as an economy, and become more autonomous politically,
or, depending on china, could actually threaten taiwan's sense of autonomy and military and economic security. now this sense of threat became very important in 2014. four years after the ecfa, as this free-trade agreement was called, was signed in 2010 and implemented in 2011, january 1, part of the follow-on to this framework agreement was to sign a series of agreement
that would further liberalize trade and investment. the first one that came up for review was called the service trade agreement. it was to liberalize services, and while the kmt had the majority in the legislature and the executive branch, ma ying-jeou decided to get this agreement ratified in 30 seconds on the floor, and that same evening that he was trying
to get this agreement, force this agreement through the parliament, taiwanese students decided to oppose this non-democratic way of doing things, and they broke into the parliament in the evening and occupied the parliament, and stayed there for nearly three weeks. this was something that initially the taiwanese public was outraged about.
they thought, our young people are breaking the law, physically breaking into government buildings, and this is not something we should be supporting. it's called the sunflower movement, and the students decided that one of the ways to express their identity was to tell the government that they do not appreciate a free-trade agreement being approved without consultation with the public,
especially among university students. students from the leading five universities started this movement, and within a few days, universities were not able to function, and they basically shut down, and professors went on the street to lecture. and the movement, unlike a similar movement called umbrella movement
in hong kong six months later, it was successful because of internal division within the kmt. the kmt speaker of the house, wang jin-pyng, was very much against president ma ying-jeou for professional and personal reasons, and therefore, there was a lot of sympathy within the kmt as to what the students were doing. but the students also were very clever
in basically being very well organized, and also attracting, appealing to the mainstream population. at first, daily polls show that they were not supported by the public, but over time, more and more people became sympathetic to the cause, and they said, that's right. the government should be more consultative about cross-strait relations issues,
because it threatens our identity. it threatens taiwan's sense of autonomy, and eventually, we could be subsumed by chinese companies, state-owned enterprises buying all of our hotels, all of our tour companies, or coming in to take over funeral parlors, beauty parlors, which are all part of the service trade agreement, which are primarily small-medium businesses
run by small-medium business families in taiwan. so this is what they were doing inside the parliament, and as young people do, they put up live streaming, and for one night, i actually stayed up at where i teach in the, i teach every year in the fall at university of virginia, so i was able to watch what they were doing all day. so they would get up,
brush their teeth, do yoga, and give speeches to each other, but it was live-streamed for everyone to watch on webcam. and they were very well-organized, and eventually, the public came to support them, and you can see, after occupying the legislature the first weekend, they had a protest all over the island, and young professionals especially
all came out to support them. parents, teachers, all joined the protest and demanded that the government stop the ratification process until a framework legislate, a law that would monitor all future cross-strait relations negotiations was passed. so what does this mean in terms of my conclusion that a fractured national identity leads to more extreme economic policy
and a consolidated national identity leads to more logical and more moderate policy that are based on economic logic? well, it means that the salience of national identity can always return, and this is what's happened. after supporting economic liberalizations, taiwanese realized that signing something like the service trade agreement
needs to be better negotiated with more understanding of the jobs it will create, with the premise of taiwan first. and while this is happening, the changing sense of national identity, of course, we also understand china's economic and political power has grown, and china is now the second-largest economy in the world, accompanied by rising nationalism domestically,
and also a more assertive military stance in the region. so what does this mean in terms of beijing's position? i wanted to address very importantly beijing's taiwan dilemma, because although i have written a book called taiwan's china dilemma, i think beijing has a bigger taiwan dilemma, because after all, it's beijing's goal to unify taiwan and nobody else's.
and there's two different players here that are very important. one is beijing, and the other is washington. so let me turn to that briefly. now beijing is faced with a difficult dilemma. it can choose to stay its course and hope that closer economic integration will lead to political spillover.
but so far, it has not been effective, and part of the reason is, of course, economic benefit has been unevenly distributed within the taiwanese community. there's a perception that the government has helped large businesses and certain interest group benefit from this cross-strait interaction, whereas the middle class and the unskilled workers and young people are not benefiting
from what beijing is giving taiwan. furthermore, the economic benefits have been inconsistent. in fact, after eight years of kmt rule, with closer and closer cooperation with beijing, taiwan's trade surplus with china has dropped to a 10-year low of $27 billion as of 2015. and therefore, strategy number one of staying the course does not seem to be working. beijing could also increase pressure on taiwan
by forcing economic and diplomatic sanctions, which it has, including restricting tourism, tourism has been down dramatically ever since the democratic progressive party that is more pro-autonomy was elected into power, sweeping with a landslide victory in both executive branch as well as the legislative branch. so beijing has decided to curb tourism,
and this has hurt taiwan's tourism industry noticeably. it can also further squeeze taiwan's space in international organizations, and even issue military threats, which it has most recently in the triannual meeting in montreal of the international civil aviation authority, for example, where taiwan was able to attend the meeting three years ago,
but this year was not invited. so beijing is making it very clear, if you don't vote for the party that we support, there will be no end to the penalty or to the retribution that the taiwanese will face. and so far, this strategy is also extremely counterproductive. i'll give you another example, actually, that is less scientifically proven so far,
but you will hear from a lot of young people. the week of the presidential election in january, there was a young k-pop singer, a taiwanese singer who went to seoul and won a singing contest. so as part of her winning the singing contest, this 16-year-old girl, who is not at all political, was waving the taiwan flag on tv,
because everybody, the japanese singer, the korean singer who wins the contest, also waved their little country flag. but of course, this was seen as totally unacceptable, so beijing decided to ask its netizens of umao, which some of you may have heard of, of basically netizens who help the government in propagandizing certain policies
at a, with compensation. so millions of netizens went into action and denounced her as an unpatriotic person who was waving a taiwanese flag, which is unacceptable, and this happened literally the night before the presidential election in taiwan. by many accounts, this led to young people overwhelmingly voted for tsai ing-wen,
as opposed to voting for the way beijing wanted. so as counterproductive as that second option was, a final option, which is the most probably effective in the long term, is the least likely to be employed by china, and that is to narrow the gap with taiwan by taking on serious political reforms and fostering civic values espoused by taiwanese. and this is something that
could pose great domestic risk for the chinese communist party, because it is dealing with tibet, with hong kong, with many other communities that have a separate sense of local identity, and this option may not even work in the long term, because polls show that taiwanese, if asked under conditional polls, if taiwan were to be able to declare independence today
and china would not attack taiwan, would you support it? more people than ever support that, and especially among the younger generation of under 29. flip it around, the conditional poll of whether you would support unification if china were more democratic than taiwan today and more wealthy. actually, a declining number of people support it,
especially among the younger generation. so even this last strategy now may be too late. washington also faces very difficult choices. the assumption in the 1970s was both sides of the strait and that the u.s. would not challenge the outcome as long as it was peaceful. this no longer holds, and the prospect of peaceful unification has diminished. the cost and risk of maintaining
taiwan's security have risen as china's military development continues. and now, with the trump administration, this is also very uncertain. washington can choose to strength its support of taiwan's international space in organizations where national sovereignty is not required, upgrade its unofficial relations with taiwan, and maintain taiwan's military capability
for dual deterrence as before. but beijing may become more and more impatient with such a policy. washington can also accommodate beijing by explicitly endorsing peaceful unification as the preferred outcome. or washington could even terminate its security commitment in taiwan in exchange for what some in washington, d.c.
call the grand bargain in exchange for chinese accommodation on other policy issues, although the details will be very hard to negotiate and might prove highly controversial in both china and the u.s. now some of you will ask, well, what does it mean, a national identity? taiwanese are chinese, ethnically.
yes, let me address this issue for a minute. 98% of taiwanese are han chinese, making them actually racially the same as other han chinese in mainland china. so what does it mean when we talk about ethnic divide? i think it needs to be explained in some detail here. well, when taiwan democratized in the late 1980s after the dictatorship fell apart, the taiwanese needed to grapple with who we are as a people.
why? because under the authoritarian regime, all taiwanese were issued an id card which artificially designated, well, i wouldn't say artificial, which actually compulsively dictated to write place of origin. and this place of origin on your identification card actually didn't, has nothing to do with where you were born.
it has to do with whether your parents or you came from china after 1949. if you came from china before 1949 or your children and your children's children, you are called taiwanese, otherwise called bensheng ren, of this province. if you are in taiwan after '49, let's say you were born in 1951 in taipei
but your parents came from shanghai, place of origin would say shanghai forever and ever, until the system, of course, was eliminated after democratization. i was reminded of it because i'm writing a chapter about taipei for a book that will be out by princeton in an edited volume with other sociologists and political economists. and i have had to read many, many books
about taipei recently, in chinese and in english, and it's very interesting that there are still people in their bio would write place of origin, and these are all taiwanese writers, and it would say zhejiang, but you know anybody under 40, or under 60, or under 70 could not possibly be born in zhejiang province, but they still identify themselves as such.
so this identification was something that was politically enforced and rigorously implemented. and it conveyed a certain sense of privilege for the waisheng ren, people not of this province, who came with the kmt after 1949. but increasingly, as taiwan democratized, two major parties developed. and as a result of a majoritarian system,
the two parties started to move towards the center, and both parties realized if they insist on this discussion of a primordial nature of ethnic identity, of whether you are taiwanese or you're not taiwanese, they would not be able to gain votes and win elections. so the initial, primitive discussion of a taiwanese national identity that was exclusive, meaning if you're not from taiwan, which is 85% of the population,
you are an outsider, you are from china. and this gave way to a much more inclusive taiwanese national identity that was based on civic values. and increasingly, taiwanese, when they say they are taiwanese, they mean that they believe in certain civic values, such as democracy, which is something they should be proud of.
in fact, taiwanese, the only, is the most democratic chinese society in asia that actually has its first female president that is not of any political family. tsai ing-wen is entirely without political background, and i think young people especially feel very proud of it. so these civic values that people embrace as being taiwanese are rule of law, freedom of speech, press, and assembly,
and increasingly for young people, it is international recognition and environmental sustainability. and this is what makes them taiwanese, not that they are by blood chinese or taiwanese. now the changes in taiwan, i like to mention, actually parallel broader international trends. this is a picture of me and my better half, harry harding, who's sitting at the table in the back.
we decided after i finished the grueling task of editing the book to take an identity tour, and that's when we went to the middle east, went to eastern europe, went to the baltic state, and here we are stopping at a central market stall in budapest. for those of you who've been to budapest, if you're a backpacker,
i'm sure you've been here, because this is where you get cheap bags. so my bag broke, and i decided to go get another one. upon coming to this stand, whose owner was not there, i saw the taiwan flag, and i said, ha, why is the taiwan flag on this stall,
and what are those other flags? now both harry and i teach international relations, i teach international political economy, and neither could name any of the flags. it was so embarrassing. so we decided to wait for half an hour until the man comes back from his lunch break. let me ask you, can anybody tell me what flag he is holding?
yes? - [audience member] tibet? - tibet? not at all. (laughing) or the flag on his jacket. bonus points. - catalonia.- yes. somebody said.
- [audience member] catalonia. - yes, it's catalonia. so i lived in spain, too, in 1991 as a student for one year, and i can tell you, i didn't know this flag, very embarrassingly, but i should have, because there are three spanish flags, actually, on this list of flags.
those are all flags with nations that would like to have more autonomy in europe. it includes the basque country, catalonia, and he is holding the flag of dracula, which is? where is dracula from? transylvania. it is a country with two million people now governed by the romanian government.
so he says to me, "you're from taiwan. "that's amazing." and i said, i just wrote a book about taiwan. he goes to the back, brings out this gigantic taiwanese flag, and takes a picture with me for his facebook page, which i quickly stopped him in his track. but he is from transylvania,
and he says, "i moved to hungary "because i don't want to raise my children "under the romanian government. "i want to raise them as transylvanians, "and i can do it better in budapest." i was astounded. so there is first the rise of local identity all around the world, and the demand for more autonomy when greater integration,
whether socially, politically, or economically, has not benefited certain groups. but more importantly, there are of course economic reasons to some of these trends. you can see this is occupy central, and while you can see that it is about economic inequality, it is also supported primarily by young people.
and this is similar to what's happening in madrid. this is a picture taken at puerta de sol last year labor day, and the reason this is also very much reflective of what's happening in taiwan, like occupy wall street, taiwan's inequality has grown in the last 30 years with more interdependence with china. in fact, taiwan's top 1% has gained steadily
for the last 30 years, while 99% have seen their wage stagnate, and the top 20% versus the bottom 20% household income proportion is now increased to 6.1 times. more importantly, this picture is a reflection of youth unemployment. at the time this picture was taken, spanish unemployment for young people was over 47%, whereas for the average was less than half of that.
in taiwan, it is similar. young people's unemployment rate is 12%, while the average unemployment rate is 6%. this is the umbrella movement six months later in hong kong. hong kong students took a page from taiwan's sunflower movement and decided they'll do it, too. i was deeply affected by it, because i primarily live in hong kong,
and i teach at the chinese university of hong kong in the spring semesters for the last 10 years, this was actually five minutes from where i live. it was highly disruptive to traffic, it lasted 79 days, and the students were a lot less experienced than the taiwanese students, and also were not able to get any concessions from the government,
because beijing was also highly involved, many people believe, in how the government would respond to the students. but what i want to highlight here is the reason this is similar to taiwan is that there's a deep sense of not only economic issues facing young people today, and it's also primarily by university students, but there's a deep sense of a value gap
between hong kong and china, just as those students in taiwan feel that there's a gap between the taiwanese and mainland chinese, what beijing is proposing. and the values that hong kong students actually value today are very different than the older generation hong kongers. older generation hong kongers say the number one value they care about is rule of law,
and this is breaking the law, because they occupy so many buildings, they block the roads in central admiralty, later to mong kok and tsim sha tsui, and really disrupted business for a lot of hotels and restaurants and banks. the young people say that their number one value in hong kong is democracy. this is a huge divide between the generations.
it's a value gap that is very hard for beijing to bridge. next picture i'm sure you're familiar with is brexit. as globalization sweeps the world, backlash against globalization has taken many forms, and you can seen farage here saying, "we must break free of the eu and take back our borders. "the eu has failed us all." studies show actually increasingly with the european project having been
the best example of how economic integration could have political spillover, there are fewer and fewer people in europe who identify themselves as europeans. in fact, more than 46% of europeans say they are of a certain nationality, and they're not european and not both. so it means when you have a poll, you say i'm italian,
and you can also choose i'm italian and european, or i'm european, and nearly half say they are of a certain nationality. so this slide has also another commonality with taiwanese in the sense that it is anti-immigrant. and taiwanese also feel very strongly about mainland chinese, whether students or professionals, moving to taiwan.
so far, this is highly controversial, and therefore highly regulated. less than 200,000 mainland chinese have become taiwanese, and it's by virtue of marriage. but there are fewer and fewer chinese women who want to marry taiwanese, so now taiwanese have a new term, new taiwanese. used to be waisheng ren who wanted to run for political office like ma ying-jeou,
but increasingly, new taiwanese mean the vietnamese bride, the indonesian bride, who have now married to, with a taiwanese men, and primarily lower class who are not able to find brides in taiwan. so immigration is something that's also very threatening. people are very worried about whether mainland chinese can come to taiwan and, for example, teach chinese.
so the teachers' union in taiwan is one of the most pro-kmt organizations in the past, but has now become extremely anti-china. this picture is something i've been showing for this fall, and i really was hoping that it would not be something i need to discuss further, but actually, it seems to be more pressing than ever before. the rise of trump also is similar to what's happening in taiwan
in the sense that a lot people who vote for trump are talking about identity. they feel that their identity is being threatened, whether it's by the immigrants or by declining economic conditions. but of course, i should remind you that both brexit and trump reflect a connection between the threatened sense of identity and voting for extreme economic policy,
but among different groups. both trump and brexit are supported by the older generation. a majority of young people did not vote for trump, majority of young people did not vote for brexit, but this is of course different in taiwan. the majority of young people are voting for more economic restrictions. i'll just leave the trump slide there while i finish my comments.
now the changes in taiwan can be attributed to unequal distributive effects of globalization, but as i mentioned, taiwan actually reflects something that's deeper, structurally problematic, and that is called the high income trap. this affects many other advanced economies, including the united states, including hong kong, japan,
and much of europe. the trap is characterized by high youth unemployment, inequality, stagnating growth, and flat wages for lower-skilled workers, and a decline in fertility. taiwan in 2011 had the lowest fertility in the world. young women in taiwan don't want to get married, don't want to have children, and therefore, young people are facing
an increasing welfare burden. this is a global trend. this sense of generational injustice, where older generations enjoy better job prospects, more secure retirement systems, and more affordable housing than the young, is plaguing all these high-income countries. but in taiwan, there's something unique. all these problems are blamed on china.
young people in taiwan perceive these problems to have originated from greater social and economic integration with china through agreements like the ecfa. increasingly, they believe that china presents unevenly distributed economic opportunities and benefits, but severe challenges to autonomy and values. the establishment is perceived as allowing businesses to benefit while ignoring inequality,
social injustice, and many problems are being blamed on china. the response of elites in taiwan, until this election cycle in 2016, and of propaganda from beijing did not help. it actually backfired, especially among young people. young people, therefore, are engaging in not only social activism
like the sunflower movement. in fact, this january, five of them won parliamentary seats in taiwan's very small, 113-member parliament and with very low cost. and this is astounding, too, in light of what happened in hong kong. some of my students ran for a legislative, the legislative council in september of this year,
and six hong kong, what they call localist, some of them espousing hong kong independence, were successfully voted into office, although they are now barred from taking oath and assuming their office. this is something that's unfolding as we speak. the sunflower movement in taiwan, which drew increasing support during the protests, is not echoing in hong kong,
but young people in hong kong and taiwan, they are not also, they are not embracing existing reform-minded parties. in fact, most young people find both the established, find the mainstream parties, whether pro-china or anti-china, to be of a different generation. this is reflective, of course, of some people consider populism or rising nationalism,
whether it's thailand, indonesia, india, philippines, spain, and here. but i would not call it populism. i would just say that there are two kinds of challenges facing the establishment which are qualitatively different. first, our immediate concerns are rooted in economic woes that can be addressed by effective public policy, such as inequality and environment.
they're difficult to resolve, but can be resolved if the government is capable and has good, has innovative policy initiatives. they are already very difficult for high income trap societies, but fundamental differences like value gap are difficult to bridge, and they relate to a deeper sense of how we relate,
this sense of belonging, identity, social justice, and democracy. one critically important question is how elites will respond in the future. as we have seen with the rise of backlash against globalization around the world, elites are slow to acknowledge the socioeconomic problems produced by integration, and their responses are unconvincing.
in taiwan, the kmt suffered a big loss because of the view that they were colluding with businesses, and taiwan's china dilemma continues as president tsai ing-wen has to decide whether to affirm the 1992 consensus, a consensus based on the one china principle, and whether to deepen or restrict economic integration with china in order to escape taiwan's high income trap.
thank you very much. - [sarah] if there are any questions, please raise your hand and michael or i will come to you with the microphone. i have a question. - yeah, yeah. - [sarah] oh, sorry. - oh, there's those two. - [audience member] thank you, professor lin,
for coming. i have a question for what would you think that the outcome would be given that you think there is this dilemma, do you think that what the path that taiwan would take in the future, do you think they would be able to actually get independence, or do you think they would be
able to just get trapped here and for, just for indefinite future? what do you think of the future of taiwan would be? thank you. - that's a very big question to address as the first question, but maybe that's good. it brings to the conclusion. so what is the future?
and actually, the real issue for the world is a trilemma, and the trilemma is among washington, beijing, and taiwan, and taipei. and the biggest uncertainty used to be beijing. i'm not sure anymore, because i think washington is just as unpredictable. so i will just address that upfront, since some of you may ask about trump. trump has never talked about taiwan in his speeches
or in his discussions, as far as we know, but one of his advisors had already said that there should be increased arms sales. however, trump is a man of great contradiction, so we will not know until it happens, because he has also said, pandered to isolationists by saying that we should ask japan and korea to pay more for their defense,
but he also proposes that we strengthen our military. so there are different trends that are interesting, and very interestingly, since 1979, the taiwan relations act actually, the u.s. policy toward taiwan has not changed. and if clinton were elected, she was unlikely to change it at all. however, with trump, there is great uncertainty,
and it could be very negative or very positive. but even if it is positive, there is a tendency, so far, trump has never talked about values or protecting other democracies, and taiwan's biggest strength was it is one of the few vibrant democracies in asia, among chinese society especially. but trump has never indicated he is ideologically wedded
to defending other democracies; therefore, even if he beefs up or sells arms to taiwan, it could be in the hope of bargaining with china. and so that is quite dangerous, because it would not be consistent, and taiwan could become a means to an end, which would be a disaster. the second question, of course, is what is the biggest issue in this trilemma?
well, until know, as i said, i think the biggest uncertainty is beijing, not taiwan. as i said, taiwan is a democracy, a vibrant democracy with a majoritarian system, one person, one vote, and there are elections almost all the time. so politicians are kept on their feet and they are never expected to be there for that long.
so i think that the taiwan's policy, as inconsistent as it was, as my book points out, in the four episodes, and president tsai ing-wen has already proposed a restrictive policy, a seemingly restrictive policy called go south, which is to encourage taiwanese businesses to not invest just in china,
but to also go to indonesia, to vietnam, to india, but i don't think actually this is a restrictive policy. it's simply good business for a company or a country to not fully depend on one other partner, and i think that is important for taiwan, actually, to go beyond the go south policy and invest more in the u.s., in japan, and acquire a higher technology,
as opposed to competing on low-end good manufacturing with chinese manufacturers who are increasingly moving to southeast asia as well. so i don't think that taiwan's economic policy has vacillated, oscillated, as much as in the past. as i said, in the first two, first decade after democratization, it oscillated greatly,
because the taiwanese people were grappling with the sense of national identity, and all the economic policy questions were overshadowed by the discussion of identity. it is no longer the case now, but, and the taiwanese are increasingly voting for autonomy. so if you look at the percentage of people who vote for independence as soon as possible or independence eventually,
they are now growing. so there's no reason to fear that the changing tides on taiwan will lead it to be, to take extreme political or economic actions. however, there is very low likelihood taiwan would revert its identity to a chinese identity, and this is something that beijing must take heed of, and i think the unpredictability, of course, is whether beijing will find this unacceptable,
taiwan continues on its own path, and find that time is not on beijing's side. and i think this is a very interesting question that remains to be discussed at our next talk, but whether the beijing leaders feel more impatient than any other actor and whether they would take precipitous action, right now i would say that china has many other core interests now
competing with the issue of taiwan. taiwan was the top of the agenda in the past when china first opened up its economy, but china now is concerned with a longer list of interest, and taiwan is merely one of them. and so in this way, i think that it depends on the 19th party congress, and there is very little information as to who is bending the ears of xi jinping,
and whether the hardliners or other people will be able to get his attention. - we'll take a lady. - [audience member] hi, thank you for coming and giving your talk. there's been literature published that confidence-building measures could be taken to improve cross-strait relations, such as joint military exercises
or more transparency in negotiations, or even collaborative efforts in cultural activities. do you think that, given the situation of today, is that still a plausible method, and if so, how much improvement will it actually bring in bringing the two parties together? - okay, let me address those separately. they're two distinct questions. confidence-building measure today is not possible at all.
after tsai ing-wen became the president, beijing signaled very clearly it will have nothing to do with the dpp government. i think that also this is because of chinese domestic politics, that all chinese leader, no chinese leader can afford to lose taiwan, but no chinese leader is burdened with unification. so it is safer for chinese leaders to be tough
and to be tough in rhetoric. so so far, that is what they have done, and i think taiwan actually was prepared for it in voting for its first female president from the democratic progressive party, who is actually taiwan's wto negotiator. so she's very pragmatic. of all the dpp leaders that could be voted in, i think she is the most ideal
of the least ideal party for beijing. yet, beijing is not having any of it. so there's no olive branch right now, and they've already stopped, effectively, all official communication channels. but does that mean there's no communication? of course not. there are many other channels that are not on the surface. but i think that today,
cbm is not in the cards. so let me come to the, and, you know, this will depend on beijing to change its mind, to recognize that it would be better for them to recognize the party that is voted in by the majority of taiwanese in a landslide than to ignore them completely at its own peril, because what happened for eight years
when chen shui-bian was the president was that he was ignored by china, so his olive branch of economic liberalization turned into restriction in his second term, because he just realized nobody in beijing would ever talk to him. and it was not helpful for beijing at all. now the second question you asked i think is more interesting,
because let's put the first question away as just part of, you know, the problems with chinese domestic politics, which we don't fully, you know, have a transparent record of, but the second issue is can cultural activities or people to be able to exchange, can cmc students go to taiwan and china and bring people together?
it's a very good question, because the most interesting polls that you should look at is what are happening to young people. and the reason i say this is taiwan, like korea, was an artificially separated community from china. until the late 1980s, nobody in taiwan had ever gone to china except those who came from china in 1949.
so what happens is you have a generation of people, many generations of people, who grew up never having been to china and who loved china who wanted to be chinese. then democratization happened, and part of identity is not just what you think you are, but what other people think you are. so taiwanese have come to the united states,
to cmc, or to china, and they've realized they're actually not chinese, because there's real chinese living in china. and so for the first time, they realize, oh, only i think i'm chinese, but nobody else actually thinks that. and so this is something that's interesting. will cultural exchange actually strengthen one's sense of chinese identity?
actually, as i said, the polls show that the younger the person is, in both hong kong and taiwan, the more likely they are, they think they are hong konger or taiwanese, and not even both taiwanese and chinese, not both hong konger and chinese. so this is very troubling, because i think hong kong's an even better example,
because hong kong after 1997 has instituted many changes in the education system to make students more patriotic. and the result is, actually, in one study by baptist university last year, not one single student they interviewed under, not one single young person under the age of 29 would say they were chinese, and these are all people who were fully educated
under the chinese rule of one country, two system. so in taiwan, needless to say, this trend is the same. so i think that cultural activities and more social interaction, in fact, is what happened. the younger generation are different than the older ones. they actually grow up going to shanghai for the weekend from taipei.
they grow up going to shenzhen, where a student here is from. there is so much interaction, so much of seeing what china is really about, that they realize they are actually taiwanese. and so i think that's a very good question, and this something that i think beijing, of course, i want to have a positive note here for beijing. i always do,
because i think there is a lot of possibility, and it all depends on beijing's actions. so if 30 years, people can switch from one identity to another, surely in 30 years, it can be reversed, but it takes a lot of wisdom and a lot of understanding. - [audience member] hi, professor lin. thanks for your very informing talk.
i have one question towards the, in your talk, you discussed how all of the young taiwanese people view china as a scapegoat for their economic problems. first, do you think that this is a very accurate assessment, or is it a just very emotionally charged, convenient response? and second, how do you think the impact, what do you think the impact of having china
placed as a scapegoat will affect the success of the taiwanese to actually affect the problems of wage stagnation or economic problems related to neoliberalism and, or big business getting more money, or rising income inequality? - thank you for that question. this is something, of course, i'm working on right now for my next research project,
and that is what are the true economic impact of integration with mainland china? well, it would be very hard to really provide data on this so we can correlate young people's bitterness and anger with economic liberalization. and the reason is very simple, because it is not simply calculating how many jobs are lost. it is not calculating how many mainland chinese
move to taiwan to study or to work that can show the full impact of mainlandization. and this is an important word, because mainlandization is, of course, what is also happening in hong kong. in taiwan it's a bit slower, because the taiwanese government, of course, takes great precaution in things like immigration, whereas hong kong has had one million people born in china
move to hong kong since the handover. one million out of seven million people. in taiwan, this is highly, it is highly difficult to immigrate. however, every day, on a daily, on a constant basis, one is reminded of mainland china's ever-growing presence, and i say that by saying to you the leading newspapers in taiwan
are owned by taishong, or taiwanese businesses that are now rooted in china. so the reversal of basically media, and all of you can appreciate the importance of media in a democratic society. taiwan's media is extremely partisan. you read apple daily to look at pro-free market and anti-communist rhetoric, and you read china times if you want to have
a pro-beijing, pro-mainland china view. and so the feeling that a lot of capital could swamp taiwan has permeated into media, and also the national museum of taiwan, which has one of the best collections of chinese art in the world, because chiang kai-shek took them all when he left china in 1949, but that now is impossible to get into
as a local person because of mainland chinese tourists. so while tourists was a great opportunity for certain businesses, the average person was affected by it by not being able to go their museum. and i think this is the bigger issue, not just exactly how much benefit or how much, what is the cost of integrating with china, but there are many social spillover and political spillover,
and i think this is what people are concerned about, even if economically, people cannot prove that the high income trap was simply rooted in this one scapegoat, as you call it. i think there are many other issues related to it. so i think this is probably a bigger issue. now the biggest issue, of course, is however small or big chinese dominance in taiwan's economy is,
it is viewed with a great sense of suspicion, because chinese state-owned enterprises, if they invest in another country, can you say that it's only economically driven, that they want to enhance shareholder's interest? i think very few of us can actually say that, and as an expert in privatization, which is what i did for the first few years working in finance,
i'm deeply aware of the role of a state-owned enterprise, and in addition to enhancing shareholder's interest, they are interested in many other objectives, and i would not disagree with them, but it is simply different than saying an economic player has come in to buy, you know, a string of companies. and therefore, many of the acquisitions that chinese companies or chinese-backed companies
in hong kong or in japan have been, have not been able to have been approved in taiwan for this reason. there's. - [audience member] hi, thank you. i had a question regarding, like, the blurring of civic identity and, like, racial identity. but you were talking about how taiwanese see themselves as taiwanese because they're proud to be from taiwan.
however, like, you know, in globalization, when a lot of students come to the u.s., they'll be seen based on their race. like, i would, like, i'm civically american, but people would see me as chinese, and so, like, how does this kind of like, disharmony in how people see them, how they identify themselves,
also play into kind of like, the autonomy of taiwan? - great question. oftentimes this question is asked by a singaporean, because singapore is the best example of where you could be a malay and a singaporean. you're basically, you have a political identity and a cultural identity, or an ethnic identity.
so many of us are americans here with different ethnicity, but that doesn't take away from the fact that we are americans, and i think the same thing in taiwan. in fact, taiwan is a multi-racial community. it has a lot of, as i said, brides from southeast asian countries now. one out of every three, one out of three babies in taiwan now
are born to a foreign-born mother, and that is how important this demographic change is. and the second thing is, i think that having a sense of civic pride does not take away from the fact that one has multiple identities. i am a woman, i'm a professor, i'm a mother, i used to be a banker, and i'm a political economist,
and i'm a taiwanese and a hong konger, so i have, you know, probably a dozen identities that i could talk about any time. and i think the key is that you can both be taiwanese and ethnically chinese. i'm certainly ethnically chinese. but just being ethnically chinese, i could be from a dozen countries in this world.
and so i think that's what's different. you want, you identify, even if you came from syria and you've naturalized and become american, you can say you're syrian and american. there is nothing that takes away from it. there was a question. - [audience member] ms. lin, thank you for the talk. my question's surrounding the economic strategy
from china to taiwan. i'm wondering, 'cause economy is still the main focus in the nation, and do you think that such economic strategy could have a possible help in bridging the culture and the civic bridge between china and taiwan, and also what type of strategy could improve the younger people? - that's a great intellectual question,
because part of my book was actually about the reverse. so the book that you see now is a small part of my research, which talks about how national identity impacts economic policy. but actually, as i said before, on an optimistic note, identity can change. and so i think your question
is asking this greater question, which is can economic policy have an impact on identity? absolutely, yes. so if you look at studies of great empires around the world, whether it's the austria-hungarian empire or the ottoman empire, when you give, when you distribute economic benefits to different members of an empire, it can absolutely bring people together.
and this is something that is very important over time, but first of all, it has to allow for multiple identities, it has to allow for some sense of diversity. the bigger an empire is, the more diverse it will be, and to have a strict sense of identity is going to make governance very difficult. more importantly, economic benefits
have to be consistent over time, not something that you dole out as a favor. and i think that if you look at the russian empire, too, basically a lot of the eastern european countries were very sad when the empire broke down in 1989, and this is because a lot of them depended on, on moscow for investments, you know, finance, and this is happening all around the world.
so i think that china can of course make economic tools something that has political and social spillover, but it takes long-term strategizing, a good plan, and a respect for the people that it governs. there's one here. oh, no. - [audience member] thank you. i'm sorry, i'm gonna ask another question,
but what do you think of the, why do you think that the kmt has failed in the recent election against the dpp, and why do you think, like, how much do you think it is related to the sunflower movement, and how much do you think that the kmt will be able to reform successfully in the coming years as hung hsiu-chu is currently leading
and helping to reorganize the party? - you know, it's interesting. a lot of people were saying the kmt is like the republican party, but that was before the election. now we know the republican party actually has a second wind. it's just, it's going with different people. and i think the kmt actually is in the same position. the existing kmt guards are going more and more extreme,
and the, and i'm glad you asked the question, because i didn't, i failed to address your question about how do you convert young people to be more patriotically chinese on the island of taiwan? i think that's a very good question. so i would just say that the kmt, before losing their election, did the sunflower movement lead to its decline? no, it's a symptom of its decline.
in fact, for ma ying-jeou's eight years of closer cooperation with china, his popularity was increasingly declining every single year. so you'll ask the question then, how did he get elected in 2008 and 2012? well, i think the dpp really was not prepared, and, you know, there's always two sides to the story. but the kmt was losing its grip, as first seen in 2014, the taipei mayor election.
taipei is a very blue city. blue we coin as the kmt or pro-kmt parties, and green we coin as dpp or pro-dpp parties. and the pan-blue have always been much more powerful in taipei than the pan-green. but in 2014, an independent, a medical doctor professor, mayor ko, was elected in, and the young people were overwhelmingly supporting him,
even those who said they were kmt supporters supported him, and he's a very pro-green independent. but he decided to run as an independent, much like the mayor of tokyo this year, because the existing parties had other candidates and other issues. but i would say that the kmt's decline was something that was happening over time, because with more economic integration,
it seemed to be benefiting the 1% more and more, and very few people were feeling the benefit while the kmt was governing for eight years. and i think that this is attributable to beijing wanting to only deal with certain interest groups, and i think even in beijing today, there is great controversy as to how their policy has failed, because you can imagine the taiwan landslide in election
is not only important in taiwan. it has huge repercussion in beijing. a lot of finger-pointing as to how could this happen, how did we help a party that lost so badly, even with everything we've done? so the latest, of course, is after losing the election, and losing, actually, support of young people, the kmt has decided to actually
have an even more extreme chairwoman. although she's a woman, this is where you say gender doesn't matter. she is very extreme. she in fact just went to meet with xi jinping recently, and she shook hands with him and said she supported the one china, the '92 consensus. now the '92 consensus is something very important for the world to know,
because beijing has decided, this is the red line. it's going to hold. what is the '92 consensus? '92 consensus is based on a series of correspondence between taipei and beijing in 1992, in preparation for the koo-wang meeting in 1993, the first meeting ever after 1949 between the two sides, which was held in singapore,
and i was there as a volunteer. i was working at goldman sachs during the day, preparing for the singapore telecom ipo, and during the night, i was helping different people translate because there were so few people who knew english. and i remember thinking, well, the cross-strait relations tension will be resolved. this is it.
there was great hope and aspiration, but of course it didn't follow. now in 1992, in preparation for this meeting, correspondence between the two sides basically talked about we wanting to recognize one china. so both beijing and taipei in the letters said they agreed to one china, but they could not agree on what that one china meant. of course, beijing means one china
under the rule of the communist party, and taiwan's side thought one china under the rule of the republic of china. and therefore, they agreed to disagree, supposedly, that there would be one china with different interpretation, and this is something that was actually formalized in 2000, many years later, by su chi. so it is not something that is actually agreed upon. i just fast-forward this very important detail
to the present. so today, china insist any president of taiwan that wants to talk to beijing must agree to the '92 consensus, and ma ying-jeou decided to agree to it in his inauguration speech in 2008. he already mentioned the '92 consensus, but he understands that he was voted in by the taiwanese people.
that's his basis of legitimacy. so he always insisted on one china, sorry, '92 consensus with different interpretation, each side with its own interpretation. so the recent kmt visit to china, chairman hung hsiu-chu decided to drop the second part. so she went to china, she shook hands with xin jinping, and she basically said,
i agree to the '92 consensus, and did not mention each side with its own interpretation. so i think the kmt is now losing a massive amount of support in taiwan, but has already gone very far since the election, and i think that either a trump-like figure would appear that would not deal with the existing kmt apparatus and show that they can win elections, or that the kmt will reform itself.
one of the reasons the kmt is not so aggressive in reforming itself, i believe, is funding. kmt is a very wealthy party because it doesn't need to fundraise, therefore, it does not understand the pulse of the public as much as the dpp, which is always lacking in resources. and therefore, much more inclined to know which young people might get elected in,
so they work very closely with the five young people who formed their own party, and basically the party is a very pro-green party, although a separate party. - [sarah] this will be our last question. - [audience member] thank you for speaking to us tonight. there are obvious reasons for why china can't accept an independent taiwan today, but could you speak to the potential benefits
that china could see regionally or internationally if taiwan, if it were to accept taiwan as a completely independent state? - i see no optimism to expect china to ever accept taiwan as an independent state. i will be the first person to say that, and i think it is important to recognize that that is not something the china today can accept domestically.
even though it's not a democracy, it has to fully face the public opinion. however, i think china has many opportunities to create a federal system, a confederal system, many, many possibilities that could make china great, and also allow china to rise in a more acceptable fashion to the world. and i think today china's strategy,
as this student has already asked, of, you know, economic policy spreading economic goods for other, for respect and recognition. in fact, i think beijing more than anyone else in the world wants respect and recognition. but using coercive measures have not really yielded the results they want, and they have doubled down on this strategy, unfortunately.
and this is obvious in the case of hong kong, where they don't really have to be so coercive. they already govern hong kong. but increasingly, this week alone, you can see all the problems coming out of beijing in wanting to reinterpret the basic law by the court. i think it's completely unnecessary for beijing to pick a fight, if you will, with people who have asymmetrical, basically, power.
taiwan has very little power. hong kong has no power, relatively speaking, but beijing sees no other route but to employ very hard measures. i think that eventually the chinese leader, and this is more along the line of what professor pei can talk about, i think there are speculations that xi jinping, once he becomes more,
once he has consolidated his position more, will become more magnanimous, will actually move to the step of figuring out how china can be great, respected, as opposed to being increasingly belligerent in, by, you know, international perception, and there are others who say that xi jinping will actually become even more coercive as he becomes stronger.
and i won't speculate on that, but i will say that on a theoretical level, there are many possibilities for beijing leaders, and it really depends on them and their wisdom. thank you.- please join me in thanking professor lin.
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