 OK. So welcome to this very special, so essential Taiwan Studies annual lecture. I'm delighted to welcome Professor Bruce Dixon from George Washington University, who's here, given his first ever talk in the UK. Those of us that study Taiwan are very familiar with Bruce's work. In a number of our Taiwan courses, we look at his work, for example, the book, Democritization on Taiwan and China, looking at the way that four Leninist parties adapted in quite different directions. In our reading list, we also look at his work on Lessons of Defeat, how the K&T responded to losing the Chinese Civil War and rebuilding in Taiwan. And similarly, we look at his work in the Tiananmou book on Elections that came out around 1996, which looks at the K&T in the authoritarian era. Bruce has kind of moved away a little bit from Taiwanese politics. So what we've asked him to do today is to revisit some of his earlier work. Personally, I find this a really enjoyable process going back to my old work. And of course, the work that Bruce is going back to is his first book. Often, as academics, our first book, I think it's often our best one. OK, I know that's a debatable one, but it's often the one that's closest to our heart. At least I feel that in my case. I should say a word of thanks. Recently, we've seen improved relations between Taiwan and China. And we've kind of seen this, to a certain extent, on a level at SOA, because this event today is an example of cooperation between the SOA's China Center and Taiwan Center. So Bruce is giving two talks at SOA. And us and the China Center are kind of sharing the expenses. So perhaps an interesting model for cross-strait relations. OK, so without further ado, let's go into Bruce's talk. And we'll also have, I'm sure, a fair amount of time for Q&A. And then we've got a reception with sandwiches as well. So let's give Bruce a big welcome. First, I want to thank everybody for coming here, for coming out on a Thursday night. I know at my school, having things in the evening is always risky. So having a full house here is really, really quite impressive. As Dr. had mentioned, he had asked me to reflect on, well, it was my first book. And it was, as I was preparing for this talk, I also realized that it was almost exactly 20 years ago that I had defended my dissertation. It was in March of 1994. And it was during the spring break for GW. And our spring break begins tomorrow. So as Sir Paul once said, it was 20 years ago today. And just sort of serendipitous that I'm giving this talk exactly 20 years after defending the dissertation. And so I'm going to talk about a couple of things, both the history in terms of how this project came about and why did this comparison between the ruling parties in Taiwan and China and what it was about the context of that time that made it a useful, in some ways, necessary project. I'm going to look at, briefly summarize the argument that I made in the book about why Taiwan democratized and why China did not. And then look at which part of both the analysis and the predictions came from it, which one still hold up and which ones have not held up very well. And then talk about the lessons that have come about both in terms of the lessons within China but also some of the changes within the larger international academic community related to these kinds of issues. And one of the key things I'm going to emphasize is that Taiwan's democratization has less and less relevance for China as we go forward. And in terms of looking at the potential evolution of the CCP, the experience of the KMT seems to be less and less relevant for looking at the CCP's future because the Poco trajectories of Taiwan and China have evolved in such different ways that how meaningful the comparison is not as obvious as it may have once was. And certainly for looking at contemporary issues, the issues that China is facing today, I'm not sure how useful the comparison with Taiwan is. This is always a point of contention for most China specialists. Many people want to argue that China is unique and really can't be compared to anything else, which I find to be something of a non-starter in terms of looking at developing theory about China. I had a research seminar last spring and a bunch of my grad students from China were saying, well, you really can't compare China to anything else. And I would say, well, why do you think civil society matters? It matters your research papers on the importance of civil society in China and bringing about potential political change. The reason you think it has potential for promoting political change is the experience of other countries. And so some of theories derived from the experience of other countries seem to be OK by doing actual point to point comparison between China and any other country for different people has problematic in different ways. I want to talk a little bit about how this project actually came about since it was my dissertation and field work that went into it and then led into the book manuscript. Part of it had to do with the third wave paradigm that was just becoming prominent in the early 90s when this project first got developed and carried out. And this is right about when much that literature was starting to really take hold. And Huntington's book on third wave kind of crystallized much of that scholarship. And one of the key things was that the democratization of authoritarian regimes begins with a split in the leadership. And so understanding what that split is and what the interests of different people are is key to understanding why some countries do and others don't democratize. And that rather than making a straight line prediction about when democratization may happen as modernization theory was, this third wave literature was much more contingent on when it may happen, why it may happen. It wasn't much at actually producing predictable, testable hypotheses, but it was much more focusing on the very contingent nature of factors that lead into the process. And especially in terms of Taiwan's democratization, both the interplay between ruling elites within the KMT, the nature of the opposition and the Dong Wai movement, and the international environment that Taiwan was part of all had different factors that kind of crystallized at the same time to make it much more possible for democratization to happen. And one of the things I learned in the process of my interviews that went into the field research, I thought that this was an example possibly of snowballing, that South Korea had democratized before that. The Philippines had their people movement that led to the overthrow of the Marcos regime. And everyone I talked to in Taiwan said, no, I had nothing to do with that. We weren't really influenced by those things. What was much more important to them, though, was that the threat coming from China during the mid-80s had moderated so much that they felt more confident they could initiate public reform, even if it would lead to a little bit of instability without having to worry about China using it as a pretense to invade, which China's leaders had laid out before. One reason they might invade Taiwan would be political instability that threatened larger issues. And they were less worried about that given the mid-80s, given the changes that were happening within China. So these different contingent issues that really were at play that I think helped explain why Taiwan democratized the way it did, but also why those things were lacking in China's case and therefore had not and has not yet led to a similar outcome. Why compare China and Taiwan to first place? On the one hand, there's major differences between China and Taiwan. Obviously, the size difference, so much Taiwan's a much smaller piece of territory, a much smaller population. Then, as now, different levels of development. The ethnic makeup, which is so much per the dynamics of Taiwan politics, is simply lacking in China. China has its own ethnic problems, but not in the same way that Taiwan does. The mainland versus Taiwanese division has no corollary in Chinese politics. It was key to the political developments during the martial law period. It was key to the transitions, key to politics now, but doesn't have an immediate counterpoint within China. But there are a couple of good reasons to do the comparison. At least at the time, there were both Leninist parties. And it was both going back to the 1920s when Sun Yat-sen had reorganized the K&T with Soviet advisers and created sort of a classic Leninist regime. A Leninist party, once the K&T had lost the Civil War and retreated to Taiwan, went through a period of reorganization to kind of revive some of those earlier organizational features. Didn't call them Leninist because that would be unacceptable. But it was, nonetheless, a typical type of, well, I won't call it typical, it was an unusual type of Leninist party given the other aspects of Taiwan. And that there were similarities, and just that they were both coming out of the same political culture. And both parties had formed roughly around the same time. They had a lot of interaction earlier in their development in different ways had learned from each other. When K&T had moved to Taiwan in the late 40s, and John Kai-shek had launched a study about why they end up there instead of ruling China, one of the things that he, the conclusions he came to was that the CCP was simply better at organization than K&T was. So if it wanted to defeat them, it had to emulate some of those features. So there are key differences between them. But also, since I'm looking at whether or not Leninist parties are able to adapt and democratize, then the comparisons seem to be at least plausible. So the context of the time was also significant. In the early 1990s, when this was being done, and my field work was in 1991, this was soon after the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in China. The immediate years immediately after that were not really good times to study the potential for political reform in China. And so actually going there and doing any type of research, interviewing anything on this topic just seemed to be a non-starter. So initially, the comparison with Taiwan was going to be more secondary. The focus was going to be on China. Taiwan was going to be more of a shadow case. But there, as a counterpoint, but as it turned out, it ended up being really 50-50 comparison between the KMT and the CCP. For one reason, it was just so much easier to do research in Taiwan than it is in China. I was able to have interviews with former prime ministers, has the organization department because they ran elections, chiefs of staff to the president. It was just amazing how easy it was to get research done and part of it, Tian Hongmao was my unofficial advisor. And having him write letters for me opened doors so fast. Because I was coming from University of Michigan, Mike Oxenberg was my main advisor. He was not a beloved figure in Taiwan because he was President Jimmy Carter's China specialist when the US broke ties with Taiwan and established relations with China. And so he was seen as just the devil. So having him as my advisor wasn't very helpful. Having Tian Hongmao write letters for me got me grant money. It got me access to people. It was just amazing. And he had no reason. I had never met him before. He agreed to do this. He's just an incredibly generous guy. And it couldn't have been done without him. The only area where doing research in Taiwan was difficult was using the KMTR cops. This is the pre-digital era in the early 1990s. So it's in this remote, at the top of Yoming Shandong in Taipei City. So I first go there and they give you a binder of all the topics they have that you might be interested in. It's broken down by time period. So I'm looking at it and there's stuff about party recruitment. And there's party government relations. And there's party building and society. This is going to be great. It's exactly what I'm looking for. And you go to the card catalog and you pull it out. It's empty. And I was, you know, and finally the heavy archive said, we have all those things. But they're in boxes in the back because it's so politically sensitive. They can't get permission to actually organize it, categorize it, and make it available. So they have it. You just can't see it. And so knowing it was there, better just say, no, it got burned when we left the mainland. That would have been better. Knowing it was there, but I didn't have access to it. It was terribly frustrating. It was one of the reasons why every time I go up there, it gives us a terrible headache. Both because of the stress of being up there, but also they told me it was a higher elevation that was part of the reason for it. But anyway, so what was happening in China in the 1990s was a key part of why I did my field work in Taiwan. It is so much more in six months in Taiwan than I ever could have done in China that I was delighted to have the opportunity. Let me kind of quickly summarize the argument and then talk about how much of it's still this valid. The argument that I made was that Taiwan's democratization was, in Huntington's terms, a elite-led transformation. In other words, it was a ruling party during the authoritarian era, the KMT, that initiated and sponsored the process of democratization. Other people argue it was more of a societal-led transition with more emphasis on the Dong Wai than I did. It was clearly elements of both the KMT was opening, but the Dong Wai was pushing. And so there's obviously both parts are relevant there, but in terms of looking at the role of a ruling party in initiating a transition and, in the KMT's point, surviving that transition, focusing on its motivations, the key leaders, and what they're hoping to achieve and what they did achieve was essential and also proved useful for looking at the potential for democratization in China. There's a couple key factors that I argued were crucial to understanding why the KMT was willing and able to initiate democratization. One was the role of ideology, that in the KMT and the ROC constitution, the commitment to democracy was there. And so what they were doing was consistent with their own provisions. They had been put on hold for a while because the opportunity wasn't ripe for that kind of arrangement, but they could legitimize it by both talking about their own constitution, as well as Sun Yat-sen previously, democracy being a key part of the three principles of the people. These things were not really relevant for the CCP. There's nothing in the party's history that would allow it to make a transition and legitimize it by referencing that democracy was part of its ideology from the very beginning. More recently, there have been vague pledges about future democratization in China, but always with the provision that it won't be a western-style democracy, it will be something else, but not a lot of flesh, a lot of detail on what that would actually entail. Elections were another key aspect, both local elections beginning in the 1970s, most of them in the 70s also a little bit earlier, and the occasional supplemental elections for the legislative yuan provide a useful source of feedback for the KNT in terms of what public opinion was toward the party and how they were doing in one election to the next. It was also information for the opposition in terms of how much support they might have and what types of messages were successful and which ones were not. It was a key avenue for participation, so both the Dongwa didn't, wasn't just left with street protests and demonstrations, it could channel activity into legitimate political institutions that kind of gave it a purpose and gave it a direction. And again, these things missing in China. There are village elections in China. Nowhere near as important as a source of feedback and nowhere near as important as a source of participation by people who want to challenge the CCP. The opportunities to be a truly independent candidate are usually, I don't want to say they're nonexistent, but they're very heavily limited by the party. To either allow them to be candidates or to acknowledge their victories should they actually win an election. So elections had a prominent role over a long period of time in Taiwan. They largely stalled out of China as a source of further political change. For a while, there's a whole topic in history about studying village elections in China. And I think it's sort of reached the point of demission returns now. There's been a lot left to learn and the elections themselves have not progressed to make it a source of ongoing, sorry about that, source of activity. And the role of elites was also essential. And this is why looking at the KNT was so important that in a curious way, Zhang Jinghua was both the patron of the hardliners and he was the patron of the reformers. And he had both of them were sources of support. Both of them saw him as their key voice. But by the mid-80s, other hardliners had been pushed out of key positions. In some cases, pushed out of the country. His own son being one of them. And more reform-oriented people like Mai Jinghua were now his key advisers. And so at this key juncture, the people who are most prominent within the KNT were themselves advocates of further democratization and further reform. Again, so using Huntington's terminology, but not quite the same diagram. When you have softliners in an authoritarian party and the opposition is relatively moderate, that's the ideal condition under which a smooth democratization can occur. And that was the condition of the mid-80s in Taiwan. So the conditions were treated fortuitous for the type of democratization that took place there. Other combinations make it much less likely that you would have a successful transition or any transition for that matter. Within the CCP, there's not been a similar willingness by any of the top leaders to actually promote wide-ranging political reforms as took place with the lifting of martial law in Taiwan back in 1986. Even the notion of hardliners and softliners isn't usually how we talk about China's fractional differences within the CCP. We talk about elitists, populists, princelings, but in some sense, they all seem to be hardliners. Except for former Prime Minister Wenjia, there isn't really anyone who's talking seriously about the promise of democracy in the near future. So just even the terminology that was used as part of the third way of literature doesn't really seem to help us understand by dynamics within China. Even the discussion of constitutional government has been a banned topic, because it is seen as a symbolizing discussion about democratic change without saying so explicitly. And so even the discussion and publication on this topic has been limited in recent years and there's no dynamics similar to Taiwanization in China. It's sort of co-opting people into the party, bringing their interests in and then having them transform the party. There isn't a similar social group like that in China that has the potential to kind of reorient the party and it's focused on the types of interests it wants to pursue. So the various things that led to a smooth successful transition in Taiwan, each of those elements are missing. So at least in terms of how relevant or what China can learn from the Taiwan experience or as we as outside analysts, what the Taiwan experience can tell us about what you expect in China since China is missing all the things, the CCP is missing the things that let the K&T do what it did gives us pause about being truly, gives me pause for being very optimistic about the potential for democratization anytime soon. What things have held up from the analysis and the predictions that come out of it? One of them is ethnicity is still the main driver of our key driver of politics in Taiwan. Even the period after democratization, the K&T split during the Lee Dong Kui era was largely about ethnicity and about his more stronger push for Taiwanese identity and independence for Taiwan leads to the formation of the new party during the 90s. It's still the source of many elections and the supporters for the K&T and the DPP is still largely about identity issues. It's not the only issue and in fact, both parties when they promote identity issues, when the DPP really promotes Taiwan independence, when the DPP promotes Taiwan independence, when the K&T identifies its sort of mainland perspective, they don't do well in elections. When they kind of focus more on domestic issues on social justice, on public policy issues, more moderate kinds of issues, that's when they do better, but there's still that division, there's still the suspicion of people like President Ma that he really intends to sell out Taiwan in order to achieve unification. There's that suspicion that simply won't die and so it still remains a key part. I just wanted to point out the symbolism that I made a point of not wearing anything blue or green. I'm not picking sides, but nevertheless that is still the difference between deep and light blue and green is still a useful framework for understanding what's happening in Taiwan. The second thing that's has held up is the CCP's opposition to democratization. It's liberalized in a variety of ways, but has, you know, it's sort of intolerant and dismissive of other desires to actually democratize. In some ways, China's more open today, certainly compared to the early 1990s when I was doing my research, China is much more open now than it was then. It lacks the kind of freedoms that we take for granted living in democratic societies, but given their own past, it's more open than it has been and that's part of the dichotomy of really understanding what's happening within China is that if you look at it as a snapshot, it doesn't compare well with other countries that are democratic in a variety of ways. If you look at it over a longer period of time, a couple of decades, a couple of generations, the changes that have taken place over the past 15, 20 years have been enormous, but they haven't resulted in anything that looks like democratization or should even be understood in terms of that, but nevertheless a freer society than would have been in the case in the past. Movement away from that in the last couple of years, but nevertheless over a longer period of time, important changes that are often not fully recognized by people who don't study China. What has not held up? Most importantly, I don't know anyone who would describe the KMT today as a Leninist party. Whatever origins it may have had have long been abandoned. The key features that we think of Leninism to organizational features are simply missing. Democratization has meant the end of traditional party building, party recruitment, party government relations that's just not relevant. And so its evolution since the 1980s makes the KMT a much different party than what it used to be and the comparison with the CCP is now much more tenuous than it was leading up to democratization. So I mentioned at the beginning one of the key things that came to me as I was thinking about reflecting on the study is that now it would be harder to do a comparison. It wouldn't be harder to do it. It would be harder to be convincing that it was a worthwhile comparison given how different they become over the past. Now almost 30 years. Second of all, I think state society relations in China are not what they look like back in the early 90s. Most importantly, it's not clear how strong the support for democracy is within China. Leading up to the 18th party congress in 2012, a lot of the media reporting was about people of China becoming patient with reform, they're fed up with the party, fed up with corruption, the party had lost legitimacy. On the other hand, there's been no social movement in China since 1989 advocating for democracy. The many protests that we see rarely are about broader political issues. They're usually about very specific and usually material kinds of issues. Public opinion surveys, going back as far as even in the early 2000s, the Asian Barometer surveys, most people in China think the country is becoming more and more democratic. But they don't define it in terms of elections, competitive parties, rule of law, the things that we think of as being essential to democracy. It's much more about having the government do things in the people's interests or to allow more freedom, as I mentioned just a minute ago. These are things that they see, that China is more democratic now than it used to be and they anticipate it becoming even more democratic in the very near future, but it's not a type of democracy that normally would be how we would define it. But if they see the country becoming more democratic, then the dissidents in the country who are calling for more democracy, the foreign governments who put pressure on China to become more democratic, public is, their reaction is, why do these people make sense of big fuss about it? It's more and more open now than it used to be. What are these people talking about? And so there's sort of a disconnect between the international discourse on democracy and the way in which people in China tend to see it in their own lives. The third thing that has held up is, has not held up, is the party's unwillingness to engage in public reform. In the book I made a distinction between efficient adaptation, in which the party is trying to revise, reform itself in ways to more effectively implement its agenda. And distinguish that from a responsive type of adaptation, which the party's agenda is changing because of public opinion. And in many ways it's still focused, the CCP is still focused more on efficient types of adaptations. How can they draw in some insight from society before adopting major policies to help implement it or get a better sense about what would be acceptable and what's not? Before the healthcare reform of 2009 was rolled out, before the labor law of a few years before that was implemented, there's a long period of public comment through the internet. Many times from specialists, healthcare professionals, doctors, hospital administrators giving input on what the new healthcare system should look like. Local budget deliberations about what the priorities of government should be for the coming year. These are things that don't get a lot of attention in the foreign media, but are important at the local level, at least in limited ways in certain key issue areas. Now these trends have to be balanced against the often tone deaf nature of the top leaders about truly bringing the voice of the people into the policymaking process, but often locally or on specific national issues, there has been much more liberalization than is often recognized. So I don't wanna exaggerate how much reform there has been, but I also don't want to ignore the fact that there are key examples of innovation and reform that have taken place, none of which amounted to democratization as I mentioned before, but are nonetheless important in their own sake. So like the photo here, the picture of political reform in China is kind of fuzzy, exactly what the party's intentions are, but it has been willing to initiate and sponsor some reforms, just hoping that they don't create expectations of even more ambitious reforms that may come later. When we're writing, we're always encouraged to make a very strong argument and not do that well on the one hand, but on the other hand, yeah it was, you want to have a takeaway line. So I really emphasize the fact that the CCP had no potential for further adaptation, and that was overstated in the case. And the party has proved to be far more adapted, I think there was a parent in the early 1990s. In, I guess it was around 2001 or so when Andy Nathan's article on authoritarian resilience, which really crystallized what a lot of people had come to understand about the nature of political reform in China. Having it come from him made it much more legitimate, because he was seen as someone who up until that time had been a strong advocate of democracy in China, was on the, could not get a visa to go to China because of his advocacy for his testimony in Congress. So when he writes about authoritarian resilience in the sense that here's a party that is adapting in very specific ways that in fact make the system work better, it carries more weight than the one that other people might say the same thing. So there's been some bad tracking in recent years, but I think in many ways the regime is firmly in place, doesn't face immediate challenge the way that often brought about democratization for other former third wave cases. Soon after the 89 demonstrations, the guy who was the US ambassador to China at the time, Winston Lord, said that the lifespan of the People's Republic would not be measured in days or weeks, would not be measured in months or years to be measured in days or weeks. And he was obviously completely wrong. It's been measured in decades. And so that may be one reason why you don't see him in the news as a consultant about what's going on more recently. Okay, I think we're talking about some of the lessons that come out of all of this. Begin with the popular perspective in China. I've found that Taiwan's democratization has not had a big impact on popular thinking about political reform in China. There's sort of a curiosity in the fact that there were elections in Taiwan for president and their competitive elections and all that kind of stuff, but they just don't see it as really relevant to their situation. So they're sort of curious about it, but not really inspired by it. They're certainly abused by it, especially these numerous photos and videos of fights among politicians in Taiwan. And for that matter, these are the kinds of images that sort of diminish the popular appeal of democracy in China if this is what democracy is, who needs it. In a similar way, take a step back. When I talk to scholars in China, Taiwan's experience doesn't really seem to matter. I mean, you would think that here's an alternative, another type of China dream, right? Here's another way that you can, a Chinese society can be governed. And it just doesn't seem to be pretty interesting, at least to the scholars that I talked to. So it hasn't really had ongoing ripple effects to change the way people within China think about the potential for change. I have met a few people on the Politburo, never had a one-on-one interview to ask them, what do you think about Taiwan? But the fact that in Taiwan and South Korea, former presidents go to jail when they leave office cannot be something that makes them fond of the idea of implementing democracy within their country. This is one thing for, one of the lessons from three-way democracies is more likely if the elites don't feel threatened by what will happen after the transition. And so the fact that they probably had no sympathy at all for Chinese people going to jail. But the fact that it did happen probably gives them pause about what may happen to them if they were to democratize the country. Some international perspectives. This would be fun, I think, during the Q&A to see how much people agree with this. I would say on the one hand, if China does democratize, it will not improve the chances for Taiwan's independence. That the notion of giving up territory is so important to most intellectuals and the average people that I know, it's unlikely they'd be more willing to tolerate independence for Taiwan if the country democratized. Many new democracies often have very nationalistic leaders and nationalism can be used as a source of legitimacy for new leaders. China's already pretty nationalistic. So if it were to ramp up after a change, it would not be particularly helpful to the cause of Taiwan's independence. A number of years ago, the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, which is an organization that publishes the Journal of Democracy and does a lot of advocacy issues on democratic issues, thought it would bring together Chinese dissidents who had emigrated from the country and Tibetans because they both had issues in freedom and reform and so on and they met and there was simply no common ground whatsoever because even the Chinese dissidents who had left the country believed that Tibet was part of China and were not about to give up control over the country and there's simply no, despite their philosophical opposition to the current regime, had nothing else in common. And so it was just a dead end. And so that's why I say if China does democratize, that won't really help the cause of Taiwan independence, at least in creating support for it within China. In a different way, if China were to become democratic, I think the international support for Taiwan would evaporate almost immediately. Because what there has been support for Taiwan's status quo is the desire to prevent an authoritarian regime taking over 20,000 people had been living in a democracy for a generation or so. But if China became democratic, that's not an issue anymore. It is an issue for people who support Taiwan's independence but for the international community, who doesn't really care a whole lot about Taiwan independence, this would give them an out to no longer stand up for Taiwan in different ways. Even within the American Congress, which the counties has usually been more supportive of Taiwan than the White House, going back to Nixon. The number of people, during the turnover of younger people coming into Congress, none of them really have a stake in Taiwan the way older people, more veteran senators and congressmen did. It's very difficult to get them focused on the Taiwan issue or care much about it. There's so many other issues involved in U.S.-China relations, whether trade, security, cyber security, human rights, those are much more prominent. The Taiwan issue is sort of fading as an issue that really animates American politicians. And the fact that cross-strait relations have been improving so much over the past six, seven years also makes it easier for it to slide off the radar for American politicians. This is also true among scholars. Much of the, well it's made the biggest splash at least in the U.S. in the last couple of years were two articles in Foreign Affairs, one by Bruce Gilley, where he advocated, he advised Taiwan to adopt a Finland model from the Cold War. In order to be allowed to be independent, it will basically surrender its foreign policy and its aspirations for a more independent status. That he thought this is the best alternative for them. And of course, it just led to a firestorm of reaction being presumptuous for a Canadian to tell, good thing it was a Canadian, for a Canadian to tell Taiwan is literally what they should do. My colleague at GW, Charlie Glazer, recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, he's a hardcore realist. But his argument was, what's most likely to have China and the U.S. go to war would be the conflict over Taiwan. So the U.S. should simply give up its even implied commitment to Taiwan's defense so that won't be an issue in the U.S.-China relationship. Good thing it wasn't a China specialist. So, Gilley was a Canadian, he can forgive him. Glazer is a realist, and of course he thinks in terms of these ways. But there have not been a lot of people, a lot of American scholars who've been doing much work on Taiwan. There have been a few very prominent ones. Shelley Rigger is probably the most well-regarded and well-known. People like Alan Walkman and Scott Kastner have also done good work, but they're sort of at more at the French. Not real well-known within the academic circles in the U.S., but the people who actually do what my book had done in a real comparison between China and Taiwan. Only one I can think of now is Ben Ried, who does work on Homeowners Associations in Beijing and Taipei. Homeowners Associates is not exactly an agenda-setting topic within political science. It's not unpolitical, but it's really about how homeowners interact with their associations to protect their interests as homeowners, not how they interact with the state to get things done. So he's in the more recent work on this, but it's sort of not a political issue having to do with reform in any ways. Most people, mostly younger generation of scholars, and I'm gonna say anyone younger than me is a younger generation of scholars in the U.S. Most of them don't have any personal experience. People older than me may have then went to Taiwan to do language study or to do research. Younger scholars have had opportunities to go to China to do language study and to do their research. And we have grants at GW to send people to Taiwan to do language study, and they usually go unclaimed because people don't want to go to Taiwan. This is, I'm sorry, it's probably wrong to say this. At GW, there's much more of an interest, and I think more generally in American universities, much more interest in going to China to do language study because you get the full experience. Language instruction is still better in Taiwan. But people are going, not just for that reason, but they want the full experience, and even for that, you know, the flagship program for language study migrated from National Taiwan University to Tsinghua, so even the program realized where the market was going, where the customers were going, and I think it's just, even among academics, there's less of a real interest or real knowledge of contemporary Taiwan, which is unfortunate. And I have to admit, as Daphne mentioned earlier, after this first book, I, you know, I kind of follow it in the newspaper or read an occasional article, but it hasn't been a key part of my research either because my real question was, what are prospects for the CCP? The KMT was an important window onto that. That's still a question I'm still asking, what is prospects for the CCP to lose power, to hang onto power, how does it do so? I'll come back tomorrow and you'll hear about that. But those questions are not as easily answered by looking at what's happened in Taiwan in the years afterwards. So, we'll get a sum up here. The argument that I made in the book that the CCP was unlikely to follow the KMT's example I think is still true that if China does democratize, it's less likely to be a party-led initiative than a bottom up societal movement. Bruce Gilley has the opposite view. He thinks that democratization will happen when reform-oriented elites emerge within the party to carry it out. So, we, he and I agreed that in the short run, I'm right, but in the long run, we both hope that he's right. Because elite-led transformations tend to be more peaceful, but they also run the risk of not actually becoming democracies, which is the next point, which was not apparent at the time when the three-way literature first was underway. The idea that you would have a transition from one authoritarian regime to another authoritarian regime wasn't really obvious back in the late 80s, early 90s. But in more recent examples, you think of the year of spring, think of the post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine more recently, the alternative to the CCP rule in China is not necessarily democracy. And so, the more that the elites trigger the transition, I would argue the less likely you get a full democratization as a result. 20 years ago, at the defense of my dissertation, one of my advisors, Marty White, who's a sociologist now at Harvard, ended by saying, I very get the book published before the CCP calls for national elections, which undermined everything that the book had laid out. So 20 years later, I can still say their prediction has held up, but I also have to admit that I check the paper every day to see, because it's easier to explain what happened. It's very difficult to know which of the trends underway now are the primary ones, and which will in fact be important in the near future. So I always check, but at least as of today, it hasn't happened. So in that sense, it's almost sad to say that it has held up for 20 years, but it has. So with that, I'll stop and take your questions and come. You're right. That personal experience has been so important for why many of us have studied Taiwan, particularly in that period of time. I mean, I think that Shari Riga was, I think she would have been doing her fieldwork around that kind of time. I know I personally first went to Taiwan as a language student in 89, 90, and then lived in Taiwan in 92 to 99. So that has a huge impact on our research direction. A lot of it is accidental. And one of the other things I picked up from your talk and from speaking to a lot of Americans is a kind of a sense of pessimism about the study of Taiwan these days in the US. Although we see the field as quite a different mood in this kind of field in Europe. There's been a lot of work, particularly on Taiwanese politics, but I think you're right. Very few people are still doing the China-Taiwan comparison. I mean, Julius Rouse is doing it, but comparing the 1950s. And one question I wanted to raise was, you talked about the impact of, or the image of Taiwan's democracy in the PRC. And it's generally quite negative, this image of chaos, instability, parliamentary violence, Taiwan independence. But to what extent has that image improved since the people that CCP won a win have been winning? They've had a little bit more success since 2008. Has that not cropped up in conversations? You know, it really hasn't. But I have to admit that when I, my conversations are more about reform in China, local issues of governance and that kind of thing. And there has to have been a specific reference to this experience of Taiwan relevant for these kinds of things. When I remember last summer when I was in China last spring, it was right at the time that it was announced that President Obama and President Xi were gonna have the special retreat in California together. And the argument that I got from a number of people, both in all academics, but the argument was, this was the, it was necessary to do it now because eventually there'd be some explosion in the relationship. The President would meet the Dalai Lama. US would announce a new batch of arms sales in Taiwan. China would have to retaliate and overreact. And they were saying as though this is largely theater, but they would have to overreact to it. And so even they were not saying it was particularly, they just saw it as another complication in an otherwise fraught relationship, but not as something that China had a potential to learn from or should learn from. These are people who mostly were studying US-China relations, so in that sense, maybe they were into right people. But I have to say it hasn't really come up in conversations that has really stuck in my memory. Okay, Charles, then Michael. Yeah, go ahead, Charles. Well, Professor Dixon, thank you for your presentation, which is very thoughtful and insightful for me. And I agree with you on your observation on the committee's change over the past few decades, and which is significant and important. And I also agree with you that we cannot apply this model directly or completely to the CCP's future. But for my experience, I think probably the two experience that the committee has gone through could be inspiring to the CCP in the future. I think the first one is the motivation to go democratization, because you see in, before 1980s, the committee was regarded as authoritarian region, but the committee delivered economic growth with so-called Taiwan Miracle, and that was a legitimacy of the committee's regime in Taiwan. But in our late 80s and early 90s, the economic growth cannot be sustained, and the economic growth rate, wow, down less than 5%. So, the committee greatly lost its legitimacy in terms of economics. So, that's the time that the committee will have to find another source of legitimacy. So, democracy became another source to collect its legitimacy. So, I would think this kind of legitimacy change or shift could be something that the CCP will have to encounter in the next decade. The second point, I think, probably the CCP will have to learn is that 30 years ago, we won't say that the campaign in Taiwan is a democratic party, but now we say the committee is totally a campaign machine. So, you can see it's totally different. And two years ago when I was called back and to be the spokesperson of the committee, I found out, wow, I didn't have a deep relationship with the committee, but they asked me to go back and to be the face of the party. Wow, it's different. And so, you can see the committee has done very hard to transform itself. And that's, I think that's exactly the CCP will have to learn. How to turn the authoritarian party into a campaign machine, which can do good in elections. So, that's two points I think probably the CCP will have to learn. And I want to have your opinion on this. And may I have a second question? Can we go back to the, okay. Right, okay, the second round, Peter. Okay, thank you. On the one hand, you're right that there are problems the party is facing that could be, that could help really legitimize itself if it went in that direction. The problem is that moving towards democracy, I think, would not necessarily legitimize the CCP. It would make it more difficult for it to really manage the transition the way the K&T did. Because the K&T always said, we are a democracy. No one really believed it, but it kept saying that. And so, now it's actually carrying it out. And for the CCP to say, they don't talk about it being inter-party democracy and so on, but that's really for people in the party. It's not really meant for society more generally. And if it were to give up its sentences as the only legitimate political party, leaving aside the eight so-called democratic parties, but it has a monopoly on political power. If it were to relax that, my guess is that it would in fact, not re-legitimize the party. It would open up space for all kinds of other parties to form. So in the process, it would just get bulldozed, or it would get run over by its own initial step. And I think that's been the issue about what has really prevented the CCP from actually carrying out more ambitious political reforms because it knows that whenever it does, society sees it as a rare opportunity to make its voice heard and then it has a potential for destabilizing and really threatening the regime as a whole. So better to not even let that discussion get started because it doesn't know how it's gonna end up. So for that reason, I think even, this is where I think Gilly is wrong, that even if there were people in the top of the party who wanted to democratize, they would have a much harder time having it evolve the way they wanted it to. Taiwan already had elections. It already had institutions. It just had to change in fundamental ways, change how those elections were run, who could run in them, which states were open to elections, but the institutions were pretty much there. You'd have to create the state from, not from scratch, but you really have to fundamentally change not just how people get elected, but who does the voting, who organizes, which parties are all, it's much more complicated than CCP. This has been so successful at preventing any type of organized opposition that that makes it so much harder for a transition to happen. So in the case of Taiwan, KMT knew who the opposition was. They were already pretty well organized. They didn't have, they weren't allowed to establish a party, but when the KMT wanted to talk to the opposition about how to move forward, it knew who to talk to. It's not clear who the CCP would talk to. And so I think that makes it, they've been so successful at repressing those voices. It's not clear who they could talk to if they wanted to manage a transition. So I think that's why I think that the context is so very different. Once you get past kind of surface similarities. Okay, right, Mike. Yeah, I wonder if you could give examples from the first Cold War European history of the difference between an elite-led transformation and what is not elite-led. I mean, it seems there's a whole raffling variety of things. I mean, the Gorbyshoff change would have been elite-led, I suppose. Whereas Bessler, Harvelle, and Chet, are other than Dr. Lee, in that sense. And other places that we don't hear about in the news like Romania, I remember. How would you characterize some of these? I'm going way outside my realm, limited realm of expertise, but I'm happy to dive in. I think the countries, the post-communist countries that have had the most successful transitions to democracy, have two things in common. One, the closer you are to Western Europe, the more likely you were to have a transition to democracy. Because you had European countries and later the EU encouraging you to come this way. And it was an economic reward for doing so. But you also had opposition figures like Harvelle as the best example of this in Czechoslovakia. Poland was also an example of a bottom-up transfer. The military tried to negotiate with Solidarity, but it was clear it didn't need to. The Solidarity didn't need to negotiate with the military. It was going to take over. But the fact that you had Gorbachev's reforms that crashed and burned, what Yeltsin did initially looked like it was moving in that direction, but it didn't get very far. And then everything that he did during the 90s guy had been eliminated since then. People in China look at Russia and the transition that happened there after the end of communism and said, you can keep it. We don't want anything like that. I mean, because savings were destroyed, life expectancy dropped by about a decade. It has the type of repressive, not just political repressive, but also high rates of crime that generally China does not have. People in China sort of recognize the limits of what they've got, but they also see progress in a whole bunch of areas that don't exist in Russia. And so they see both the party leaders and I think society more generally sees Russia as what to avoid. And better to let things kind of percolate as long as they are, not push for something dramatic right now. Okay, yeah, Raymond. Well, thank you, Professor Dixon. You mentioned about a lot of, I would say, less positive sort of an impact of how it is political development on many China. I think in my personal experience talking to people in many China, that might be true in the early years. However, I think after we've seen the peaceful and smooth change over power from, say, KMT to DPP and then back to KMT, I think in the way the positive image of Taiwanese politics, I think now is more, I would say, more prominent than before. My question to you is actually, in China is why do they believe that the democracy in Taiwan was very much done to one person, Jiang Jinguo, because it's him lifting the, you know, the martial law and also the ban on political parties? Well, now we have a new leader in Xi Jinping. In your crystal ball, do you believe that Xi Jinping could be Jiang Jinguo equally in China to change the democracy? No. And I'll tell you why. China's leaders, this is true for Kuzhen Tao and it's also true for Xi Jinping, you don't get ahead in the Chinese political system by being politically innovative. You know, in the United States, we like Mavericks in our political system. You don't get very far if you're a Maverick in China. And so for both, you know, for Kuzhen Tao, he spent 10 years where it's clear he was gonna be the next leader. And so his goal was to say nothing and do nothing that would make people second guess that status. I think the same thing for Xi, when he came into office, as when who came into office, there was hope among liberals in China that there was some indication that they might be people who would sponsor more wide-ranging reform. Before who became president in 2002, when he was head of the Central Party School, he had, there were studies in the Central Party School that looked really ambitious and really liberal. And the assumption was, since he was the president of the school, he must have authorized it. Well, apparently he didn't read them when they were done because he never did anything that would indicate that he was really reformer, but was waiting for the opportune moment. Xi has continued the more repressive atmosphere that began at the end of the Kuzhen Tao era. You could argue, as, this is more what we refer to as cocktail talk, they're really academic discourse. You could argue that Xi is setting things up, showing that he's really tough, he's willing to be repressive, so he's got credibility among other hardliners to make it easier for him to loosen up later. Or he really wants to be repressive, and so he's doing what he wants to do. We may not know, but there's nothing in his background from previous positions, previous policies held to indicate that he's any different from what he's showing us now. So in that sense, I don't have much hope that he is gonna be anything like Zhang Jinghua in Taiwan, although I will say, not many people expected Zhang Jinghua to be Zhang Jinghua in either. So a lot of people saw him as being the head of the security apparatus and all the bad things were his responsibility too. So he was not exactly seen as for decades before, or not, I think for years leading up to it, that here was a guy who was determined to make Taiwan truly democratic. So an ambiguous case, definitely. Thank you. Okay, any more questions before I head back to Charles? Yeah, yeah, and then Theo. I was wondering, do you want to say to increase tourism or travel, individual tourism from China to Taiwan matter? I mean, does it matter politically, or is it so small that the CCP remains pretty confident about this? Well, it's certainly growing. I don't know if I'm ahead of the numbers, but certainly the opportunity is to travel to Taiwan, it's certainly growing. And I don't think there's been any study that I'm aware of, at least, about how public opinion, public attitudes have changed by the people who've gone there. So that was part of, I'm going off on a tangent, part of the U.S. strategy for bringing about change in China was to let lots of tourists come here, lots of students are here, to the United States, I forget where I am, come to the United States to live, to study, to work, whatever else, they would then get infected with the democratic virus, and then they would go home, and it would spread. The problem is that many of them did not go home because once they got to the United States, they wanted to keep enjoying what they'd been enjoying. The people who did go home were often very disillusioned by their experience in the United States, did not have a very happy experience, and didn't go home with warm and fuzzy feelings about the United States. And I think the people who, the tourists have gone to Taiwan, like the tourists have gone to the U.S. or other places, often go back, have enjoyed the experience, but don't carry back the idea like, well, how come they haven't so good, why can't we have it like that? Like the time of presidential, when Taiwan has a presidential election, it's often followed in China, but I haven't gotten a sense, well, people in Taiwan get to elect their leaders, how come we don't get to do that? It hasn't led to that kind of reassessment, which is surprising because you think, well, you know, these are two Chinese societies, why don't they draw inspiration from it? But they don't seem to. I don't have a good explanation for it, but at one point there were people who were arguing China should democratize because that would make it more likely to unify with Taiwan. But that quickly went nowhere because that seemed like an awful high hurdle in order to achieve unification. So even that notion that one of the advantages of becoming democratic would be to enhance the prospects for unification, I haven't heard that mentioned in a long, long time. So whatever reason is, it just hasn't been an inspiring case for people in China. But I think there's definitely a great topic for a piece. It really is. It really is. And I know they're starting to do research on Taiwanese perceptions of Chinese tourists. Yeah. So sociology are doing that kind of research now. It's not a very flattering picture. No, actually. I mean, that was the one of the things we Chajudo was talking about this topic in December. And one of the things he picked up was how female respondents, no matter what their party identification was, had very negative perceptions of Chinese tourists. So there was a really clear male-female divide rather than a partisan divide in that issue. A key point because the international community, the things that the international community is doing in a political sense towards China is not really advantageous if you want to give them more confidence at initiating democratized reforms. The fear of the rise of China, what it means for American security interests or Western interests more generally, both in Asia and around the world, there's almost a hysteria about it. It's one of the, nowadays, about the only international issue that resonates with voters in the United States. It's very easy for politicians to run sort of anti-China ads without having to apologize for an afterwards. So there's this notion that China's a threat. We should face up to that threat. We should be tougher on China, which is the opposite of what was happening in Taiwan in the mid-80s, where the threat from China was moderate, was getting less severe, less likely that China would actually attack. When the US is pivoting towards Asia and when its neighbors are in conflict with China territorial issues, we can argue about whether China's the cause of many of those things, but nevertheless, the international environment looks pretty threatening. And so that being the case, it's kind of hard to imagine how leaders would be more inclined to be ambitious in the sense of political reform, knowing that they're facing large powers, most local regional powers, who are not really fond of what's happening. Telling American politicians they should take a more moderate tone towards China as a way of encouraging reform. And that ain't gonna happen. They're not gonna be influenced by that. But the implication of your question is right, that the more hostile the environment looks, the more it benefits hardliners who say, we're up against a very threatening system. They're out to get us. They're promoting color revolution in China. They're promoting internet access. All these things are done to undermine our control. That's a powerful argument to make. And the science that in fact, the international communities are looking to cooperate with China on a variety of issues, it's harder to make that case. So I think the international environment facilitates hardline reactions domestically and abroad, which runs contrary to trends that would be towards more political opening. Okay, on that note, I think we're gonna have to finish. Let's give Bruce one more round of applause.