This collection of essays brings together several papers published by the author in the past 45 years, arranged chronologically, so the reader will follow the unfolding development of the author’s thinking on the issues discussed here. The essays primarily investigate the political reform promoted by intellectuals and the professional classes in Taiwan beginning in the 1970s and the introduction of a national human rights commission in the 1990s. The latter is here analysed under three headings: the creation of a national human rights commission; the drafting and review by foreign experts of the national reports on two international human rights covenants; and the handling of transitional justice. This book will be useful for historians and social scientists of 20th century Taiwan, as well as anyone interested in contemporary politics in the state.
This book tells a story of Taiwan’s transformation from an authoritarian regime to a democratic system where human rights are protected as required by international human rights treaties. There were difficult times for human rights protection during the martial law era; however, there has also been remarkable transformation progress in human rights protection thereafter. The book reflects the transformation in Taiwan and elaborates whether or not it is facilitated or hampered by its Confucian tradition. There are a number of institutional arrangements, including the Constitutional Court, the Control Yuan, and the yet-to-be-created National Human Rights Commission, which could play or have already played certain key roles in human rights protections. Taiwan’s voluntarily acceptance of human rights treaties through its implementation legislation and through the Constitutional Court’s introduction of such treaties into its constitutional interpretation are also fully expounded in the book. Taiwan’s NGOs are very active and have played critical roles in enhancing human rights practices. In the areas of civil and political rights, difficult human rights issues concerning the death penalty remain unresolved. But regarding the rights and freedoms in the spheres of personal liberty, expression, privacy, and fair trial (including lay participation in criminal trials), there are in-depth discussions on the respective developments in Taiwan that readers will find interesting. In the areas of economic, social, and cultural rights, the focuses of the book are on the achievements as well as the problems in the realization of the rights to health, a clean environment, adequate housing, and food. The protections of vulnerable groups, including indigenous people, women, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) individuals, the disabled, and foreigners in Taiwan, are also the areas where Taiwan has made recognizable achievements, but still encounters problems. The comprehensive coverage of this book should be able to give readers a well-rounded picture of Taiwan’s human rights performance. Readers will find appealing the story of the effort to achieve high standards of human rights protection in a jurisdiction barred from joining international human rights conventions. This book won the American Society of International Law 2021 Certificate of Merit in a Specialized Area of International Law.
Taiwan is still seen by many as an oriental military dictatorship, tainted by the imposition of a Kuomintang party-state which had lost the civil war in China to the Communists in 1949. And Taiwanese politics are often regarded as peripheral to the study of modern China. Yet exciting political developments have taken place since the mid-1980s; Taiwan has emerged from dictatorship to become, in the early 1990s, a state with an increasingly democratic orientation. When, in the late 1950s, the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek settled down in Taiwan and accepted that it was unlikely to recover the Chinese mainland by force, it turned to "soft authoritarianism". But in 1986 Chiang Ching-kuo, then President, made the fateful decision to end the long-standing ban on an effective opposition. Taiwan still has some way to go, but in the general election of December 1991 it passed the point of no return to become a democracy of a kind recognisable in the West, thus challenging earlier assumptions that liberal democracy and Chinese culture are incompatible. It also raises the question whether the Kuomintang party-state's experience over four decades in accommodating socio-economic changes in Taiwan holds any lessons for the Communist party-state across the Straits. Taiwan's move to a prosperous, stable and increasingly democratic system under ethnic Chinese rule must present a challenge to the leadership on the Mainland and serve as a model for many people there. These important issues highlight the need for closer study of Taiwan, which needless to say is an important subject of study in its own right. This volume has been written to meet this need, and at the same time to disperse out-of-date conceptions still prevailing. It is an international collaborative effort by the world's leading specialists on various aspects of Taiwan's political development, from Taiwan itself and several other countries.
The conference that forms the basis for this book was held in Taipei in 1989. With contributions by political figures from both the Kuomintang and the opposition Democratic Progressive Party, as well as leading scholars from Taiwan and the US, this book discusses the critical issues affecting the future of Taiwan. The book discusses Taiwan's economic achievements, its pathbreaking experiments with political reform, its unique patterns of political participation, its example as a fully modernized Chinese cultural community, its importance in the world trading system, and its key role in Pacific Basin international relations. It also discusses how these factors have made Taiwan a focus of interest for students of economic development, comparative politics and international relations.
This book shows that Taiwan, unlike other countries, avoided serious economic disruption and social conflict, and arrived at its goal of multi-party competition with little blood shed. Nonetheless, this survey reveals that for those who imagine democracy to be the panacea for every social, economic and political ill, Taiwan's continuing struggles against corruption, isolation and division offer a cautionary lesson. This book is an ideal, one-stop resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of political science, particuarly those interested in the international politics of China, and the Asia-Pacific.
In Taiwan's Democracy on Trial, Professor Copper assesses the process of democratization in Taiwan during the Chen Shui-bian Era (2000 to 2008) and after. He shows that in several respects, most important being press freedom, human rights, ethnic relations, political reform, constitutionalism, and clean governance, democratization regressed. Economic management was not good and relations with the United States were severely strained, which also hurt the Chen administration and explains why the Nationalist Party returned to power in 2008. The democratization process has improved since 2008.
This book examines the most important issues determining the international status of Taiwan today: its international legal status, the viability of its flexible democracy, its efforts to gain participation or membership in international organizations, most notably the United Nations, and its future relations with mainland China, ranging from reunification to declared independence. Issues of American and European foreign policy and of domestic Chinese and Taiwanese politics are also addressed where relevant. This book is unique in that it looks at the question of Taiwan from the perspective of both international law and politics as it confronts the imperatives of law and the limitations of real world politics. As a result it offers insights and strategies that are both sensible and feasible. This book is aimed at scholars and practitioners of international law and international relations alike.
The author treats Taiwan as a case study of how an authoritarian regime may become more democratic. He addresses the complex issue of how the Kuomintang was able to sustain its authoritarian, repressive political system in the context of a highly successful market-oriented economy, and how Taiwan's social and economic changes at last forced the political elite to respond with reforms of the political system. Tien sees the forces of "Taiwanization," liberalization, and political democratization as central to the current transformation of Taiwan's political system.
