Confrontation with the United States } 619
Intense partisan competition and constitutional reform paralleled Taiwan’s
identity debate. The election of Taiwan’s leader by direct, popular vote (first
implemented in March 1996 against the background of PLA military intim-
idation) meant that people aspiring to government office now had to cater to
popular opinion. People on Taiwan were immensely proud of what they had
achieved—first economic development and then peaceful transition to liberal
democracy. Having long been forced to keep quiet and allow an authoritarian
government to speak for them, the people of Taiwan now delighted in finding
their own voice. Staking out positions on the identity issue and demonstrat-
ing one’s effectiveness in enhancing Taiwan’s international status became
key ways of appealing to voters. Lee Teng-hui became an astute practitioner
of this new brand of electoral politics in Taiwan. After inheriting power as
Chiang Ching-kuo’s designated successor, Lee refashioned himself as a pop-
ular leader capable of raising Taiwan’s international status and expanding
its participation in international affairs. In 1994, for example, Lee and his
vice president Lian Chan made trips to Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and
Indonesia to play golf with senior officials of those governments. This flex-
ible “golf diplomacy” expanded Taiwan’s contacts with major countries hav-
ing diplomatic ties with the PRC. Lee’s visit to the United States in June 1995
was the highest-profile success for Lee’s “pragmatic diplomacy.” One of Lee’s
major campaign pitches was that he had been effective in enhancing Taiwan’s
international status—witness the Taiwan Policy Review in the United States,
golf diplomacy in Southeast Asia, and Lee’s 1995 visit to the United States.
In the United States, there was strong sympathy for Taiwan and its
transition to democracy. Taiwan was an old ally and friend of the United
States. During the two decades of confrontation with “Communist China,”
Nationalist China, or Free China as it was then called, had served as an ex-
tremely important ally of the United States in containing Communist China.^16
Now that Taiwan was democratic, US values and interests were more con-
gruent. America’s friend was now a democracy, not a dictatorship. Ever since
1952, US policy had sought to nudge Taiwan slowly and incrementally in the
direction of liberal democracy. Various levers of US influence in Taiwan had
been used to push it slowly in that direction over several decades. Now, in
the mid-1990s, that objective was finally being realized. Taiwan’s democratic
transition occurred about the same time that similar transitions were un-
derway in South Korea and the Philippines, constituting a wave of liberal rev-
olutions across the region.^17 The United States now had friendly democratic
partners along the entire western Pacific littoral, from Japan through South
Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines to Australia. This created a geopolitical
position of considerable strength for the United States in the western Pacific.
The view from Beijing was profoundly different. From Beijing’s perspec-
tive, Taiwan was a part of the People’s Republic of China. The island had been
returned to China’s sovereignty by the Cairo Declaration of December 1943.