Taipei, Taiwan
ONLY FIVE DAYS before the end of his tumultuous 12 years as president of the Republic of China on Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui appeared in a relaxed, reflective mood. Speaking with a small delegation of American sympathizers assembled and led by American Conservative Union chairman David Keene, the 77-year-old Lee looked at his visitors with sudden animation and quoted a famous question from the 16th chapter of the Gospel of John: “Quo vadis?” It was, he said, a question he had always forced himself to confront in his political life: “Where are you going?”
Lee’s answers to this question were hardly ever what people expected. A native Taiwanese who went to university in Japan and has never set foot on the Chinese mainland, Lee was groomed for the leadership of the Republic of China and of its governing party, the Kuomintang, by the late president Chiang Ching-kuo, son and political heir of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Considered a trusted “team player” as vice president in the 1980s, Lee succeeded to the presidency on the death of the younger Chiang in 1988 and became known for remoteness, decisiveness, and unexpected public moves.
He contributed greatly to Taiwan’s high-tech economic boom by striving to decouple Kuomintang machine politics from business decision-making. He took his party’s ideological indoctrination out of the schools. He liberated the press and opposition parties and instituted democratic elections, first for the National Assembly and ultimately (in 1996) the presidency. By a hard-boiled, foreign-aid-centered diplomacy, he raised Taiwan’s international profile, and he legalized Taiwanese investment on the mainland for the first time. He even increased the number of nations (from 22 to 29) granting full diplomatic recognition to Taipei in preference to Beijing.
Despite all these achievements, around 1994 Taiwan faced a grave threat to its survival: a public shift in the Clinton administration toward a deeply pro-Beijing policy. For all Taiwan’s engagement with the rest of the world on trade, investment, and even diplomatic issues, the United States is Taiwan’s only lifeline against the potential military threat posed by the mainland. It was in 1994 that Bill Clinton dropped human rights as a factor in his China trade policy. By 1996, the administration’s last significant pro-human rights policy makers, Warren Christopher and Anthony Lake, were lame ducks who had been pushed aside by Lake’s then deputy at the National Security Council, Samuel Berger, and others who were willing to subordinate virtually all other factors to the expanding American trade with China. As we now know, the policy shift coincided with the 1995-96 Clinton fund-raising scandals.
Lee believed Taiwan was being marginalized. That is the context in which he engineered his various in-your-face confrontations with Beijing, beginning with his visit to Cornell University in 1995. The pivotal moment was the first popular vote ever for president of the Republic of China, in which Lee won more than 70 percent, while Chinese-launched test missiles were landing in the Taiwan Strait. By 1999, when Lee called for negotiations based on equal sovereignty of the two Chinas, the world was no longer in danger of forgetting Taiwan.
Accused by Kuomintang elders of betraying the party that had elevated him to power, Lee proved to be Chinese communism’s worst nightmare. In fact, his triumph over domestic authoritarianism was the basis of his threat to the oligarchy in Beijing. By bringing a free and orderly democracy to a Chinese culture for the first time in history, making possible the victory of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive party in the March 18, 2000, presidential election, Lee more than anyone else put the lie to the recently fashionable idea that East Asians need “Asian values,” a euphemism for political repression, to produce their high-tech miracles. Taiwanese companies today account for more than half of the world’s production of computer notebooks, a remarkable position of dominance for a nation of 23 million, and a position achieved during the intense decade of democratic reforms forced through almost single-handedly by Lee Teng-hui.
Lee retires from the presidency at the age at which Ronald Reagan left the White House. Indeed, Lee’s ability to overcome the disdain of political elites by mobilizing average voters to achieve victory after victory on behalf of his own almost mystical vision of human dignity makes the parallel with Reagan quite striking.
Like Lee, Reagan left office at the peak of his popularity; but only later could such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union make clear that the Reagan presidency had been transformative, not just of his nation but the world. Lee finds himself in a similar ambiguous position as he gives way to Chen Shui-bian, a gifted and much younger leader (49 years old) with a collegial, consensus-driven political style the polar opposite of Lee’s.
So different from his predecessors in most ways, Lee was the fifth consecutive Protestant Christian head of the Republic of China (and of the Kuomintang). The five were all effective modernizers in their different ways. As President Lee spoke with our delegation in mid-May, it was impossible not to notice the imposing portrait of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China and the only other democrat of the five, directly above the president’s chair. It seemed fitting, I observed, that the democratic revolution begun by Sun so early in the 20th century was being brought to fruition in Taiwan by his political descendant at the dawn of the 21st. Lee seemed pleased by the comparison. The seemingly innocuous exchange was widely reported in the Taiwanese press the next day, and we later learned that Lee’s aides had released the remarks shortly after the private meeting with our delegation. One rather garbled version implied the American Conservative Union was planning to make a documentary film about the president entitled Mr. Democracy.
If a film is ever made about Lee, it could portray him as a hero who pushed the Chinese people decisively toward a democratic future, or conceivably, as a feckless radical who provoked an unstable regime in Beijing to the brink of war, or beyond. As to his own future, Lee expressed to us a desire to avoid becoming an adviser to President Chen, and he has publicly speculated that he may wind up as a Christian missionary to Taiwan’s aborigines. The one thing that is clear as Taiwan inaugurates a new president — the non-Christian, non-Kuomintang, former political prisoner Chen Shui-bian — is that Lee has succeeded in posing his favorite question to all Chinese, on the mainland and in their many overseas habitats as well: Quo vadis?
Jeffrey Bell, a Washington-based economic and political consultant, is the author of Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality.
