environmental protection but also neglected other issues such as labor welfare
and women’s rights. Pent-up pressures for reform stimulated the regime to
allow gradual political liberalization in the 1980s. Taiwan’s resulting
democratization is neither a top-down nor a bottom-up revolution. No single
force determined the outcomes, and the result reflects cooperation and
interaction between state and society.^38
Taiwan’s style of democratization created new actors, such as business
groups and indigenous elites who were absorbed into policy-making roles.
While a strong middle class pushed the state to expand political liberalization,
a new ‘Taiwanese culture’ also developed within the general public. By the
1990s, identity politics increasingly de-emphasized Chinese origins, which
was exacerbated by Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation.^39 The growing importance
of a Taiwanese identity further localized the domestic regime in Taiwan, and
facilitated the consolidation of democracy.^40
Prior to the 1996 presidential election, the KMT regime, still dominated by
mainlanders, remained alien to many Taiwan residents. Lee Tenghui’s
election, the first democratic presidential election in any Chinese state,
indigenized the regime and significantly enhanced its legitimacy. The 2000
election, which brought minority Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
candidate Chen Shui-bian to power, revealed the fault line of twenty-first-
century politics in Taiwan, which was sharpened in the 2004 election. The
DPP (head of the pan-green alliance) controlled the powerful executive, but
the opposition pan-blue alliance, including the KMT, People’s First Party, and
the New Party, still enjoyed a slight majority in the Legislative Yuan. The lack
of trust between the ruling alliance and the opposition alliance led to a
stalemate, political sabotage and political conflicts among political institutions
and political elites. Heated ethnic conflicts roiled society and the polity
was increasingly divided into the two extremes of pro-independence and
pro-unification camps. Since 2000, people’s satisfaction with the actual
performance of Taiwan’s democracy, their trust in the major institutions of
democracy, and their faith in the superiority of such a regime have all
declined.^41
CHANGES OF ENVIRONMENTAL OPINION IN
TODAY’S CHINA AND TAIWAN
This discussion of political and economic change in the last generation, and in
particular its deleterious impacts on threatened and endangered species and
ecosystems, prompts these questions: How aware are the public of adverse
environmental change? How important are environmental problems as
compared to other social, political, and economic issues? Does public opinion
Historical patterns 31