Confrontation with the United States } 621
large percentage of people on Taiwan share the American view of the origin of
legitimate government authority. Democratic self-government was, after all,
the goal of a long, hard struggle under the KMT’s hard and soft dictatorship.
In China’s venerable political tradition, on the other hand, the legitimacy
of political power never rested on the consent of the governed. In China’s tra-
dition, legitimate government derived from the superior wisdom and virtue of
the rulers, and from the benevolent and orderly government that supposedly
resulted from that superior virtue and understanding. Within this Confucian
tradition, asking ordinary people to “consent” to the authority of the emperor
and his officials was as nonsensical as asking children to consent to govern-
ment by their wise and benevolent parents. The children/people simply lacked
understanding. The rulers had superior understanding that vastly exceeded
that of their child-like subjects.^18 Like China’s great emperors of the past, the
CCP believes it is ruling in the interest of all Chinese on the basis of its supe-
rior understanding and virtue. Resort to Western notions of government to
“split China” is simply unacceptable.
In a way, the political psychology of Taiwan’s electorate was the proximate
target of the PLA military demonstrations of 1995–1996. Taiwan’s democra-
tization was moving the island’s political scene into uncharted territory and
seemed to be inspired by the belief that the people of Taiwan themselves
could determine Taiwan’s future, oblivious to the reality that that island,
and all its inhabitants, were, from Beijing’s point of view, under the sover-
eignty of Beijing. Taiwan’s people needed to be instructed in this simple re-
ality. They needed to be made aware that there were limits beyond which
Beijing was prepared to go to war. A hard lesson in the realities of Taiwan’s
situation might also mobilize opposition to Lee Teng-hui within Taiwan. Lee
Teng-hui’s efforts to establish the Republic of China on Taiwan as a sover-
eign state, coequal to the PRC, was met with dismay by many people within
the KMT, Lee’s own party, who believed ardently in the old orthodoxy that
Taiwan was a province of China, albeit the Republic of China.
In August 1993, a block of KMT leaders withdrew from that organiza-
tion and formed a new party, called the New Party, largely out of opposi-
tion to Lee’s movement away from the traditional KMT goal of reunification.
Further to the left of Taiwan’s political spectrum, the DPP favored a plebiscite
followed by outright declaration of a Republic of Taiwan and of that entity’s
independence from China and the PRC. Some members of both the DPP and
Lee Teng-hui’s faction of the KMT believed that their policies could be imple-
mented without war. They believed the PRC was bluffing and, if tested, would
acquiesce to faits accomplis created by brave and resolute Taiwan leaders.
These beliefs had to be punctured, CCP leaders concluded. Taiwan’s newly
empowered voters, and its newly democratically elected leaders, had to be
taught that there were limits to Beijing’s tolerance and quest for peaceful uni-
fication. Taiwan had to be made to understand, Beijing concluded, that China