Pod Insights If You're Listening Taiwan’s violent, messy, beautiful democracy About this episode A fistfight erupts in Taiwan's parliament. Punches fly as two rivals find themselves at the centre of the chaos. On one side is Chen Shui-bian, a member of Taiwan’s progressive DPP who became Taiwan's first president from outside the long-ruling KMT. On the other is Han Kuo-yu, a KMT populist. But this isn't just another political brawl.
Their careers mirror Taiwan's transformation from authoritarian rule to one of Asia's most vibrant democracies. At the heart of the story is an unresolved question: what is Taiwan? While politicians have spent decades debating the answer, most Taiwanese people have embraced the status quo, neither part of China nor formally independent, but something in between.
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0:08 Speaker 01 At a rural picnic spot in the dark, a young man suddenly disappears.
0:12 Speaker 02 You could nearly say an alien took him away because he's just vanished.
0:16 Speaker 01 When more clues from that night surface, something doesn't sit right.
0:20 Speaker 03 It's nonsensical where the stuff is. It's been scattered.
0:23 Speaker 01 I'm Rob Bergen. Join me as I investigate what became of Jack in the new season of Unravel.
0:28 Speaker 04 Is it a murder? Is it someone just gone missing? You know where my son is.
0:32 Speaker 01 Search for the Unravel podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uabakal and Gadigal people.
0:44 Speaker 01 In Australia, we often say that our politicians act like schoolchildren while they're in parliament. But in Taiwan, the connection between the parliament and school is a bit more explicit.
0:56 Speaker 05 The building in Taipei's Zhongshan district was Taipei's second girls' high school in the Japanese colonial era.
1:02 Speaker 01 Many of the parliament's offices and committee rooms are former classrooms.
1:07 Speaker 06 After 60 years in a former girls' school in Taipei, many think a change of scene is needed.
1:13 Speaker 01 But I don't think that any high school in the world experiences as much violence between its students as the Taiwanese parliament.
1:24 Speaker 01 Taiwan's parliament is famous for its brawls.
1:31 Speaker 01 From what I can tell, the violence is of two different types. One is kind of theatrical. It happens in the parliamentary chamber itself, where the governing party and opposition physically fight over who will sit in the speaker's chair and direct proceedings.
1:48 Speaker 02 The Kuomintang Party occupied the parliament in protest against what they call government tyranny, forcing members of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party to climb over furniture stacked in front of the entrances.
2:02 Speaker 01 It doesn't actually stop legislation from passing. It's more about making it very obvious how much you oppose it. But there's another type of violence that happens in the committee rooms, which of course were former classrooms.
2:18 Speaker 01 On the 5th of May 1993, there was one particular fight that I find extraordinary.
2:29 Speaker 01 That afternoon, there was a heated discussion about spending on Veterans Affairs. Suddenly, a nationalist KMT legislator called Han Gou Yu thought he heard Opposition MP Chen Shui Bian call Taiwanese veterans pigs. Han went up to the table Chen was sitting at and flipped it. And then moments later, when Chen went and sat at a different table, Han walked up behind him with his hands in his pockets. Then he pulled his left hand out and slapped Chen as hard as he could right in the face. Chen was completely unprepared to be sucker punched out of nowhere in the middle of a parliamentary committee meeting.
3:14 Speaker 01 He was taken to hospital with swelling in his jaw and a concussion.
3:21 Speaker 01 Now, this particular series of events is extraordinary for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of what ended up happening to the two people involved: Han Gou Yu and Chen Shui Bian.
3:42 Speaker 01 Since that slap, Han and Chen have become two of the most prominent people in Taiwanese politics, representing the two major parties, the KMT and the DPP. One of them became President of Taiwan, the other is the Speaker of the House. One was shot and went to prison. The other has been called the Taiwanese Trump. So today, we're following the extraordinary journey of these two men through Taiwanese democracy, because it turns out that punch was just the beginning. I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.
4:19 Speaker 01 So we've got two stories to tell in this episode. The perspective of the puncher and the punchy. So let's start with the punchy, Chen Shui bian, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party, or the DPP. On the 19th of March 2004, Chen was back in the hospital. This time, it wasn't because of being punched in the head. It was because he had been shot.
4:44 Speaker 02 Details are still sketchy. What we do know is that President Chen Shui bian has been taken to hospital with a stomach wound. There are reports that it's a deep wound, blood pouring out.
4:55 Speaker 01 Now, you may have heard the word president there. And that's because in the time between getting punched and getting shot, Chen had had quite a bit of political success. So let me just get you up to speed on his career.
5:07 Speaker 02 He's the classic underdog of Asian politics, a dissident who was jailed for his beliefs, with a wife who was paralysed in what some claim was a politically motivated attack.
5:17 Speaker 01 She was run over three times by a man in a tractor in 1985. Safe to say, these guys have experienced quite a bit of adversity. But that's just how things went at the time for people who prominently opposed the Kuomintang, or the KMT, the nationalist party which controlled Taiwan under a military dictatorship from the 1940s, right up until the 1990s. We covered that in our last episode. Chen Shui bian was a member of the DPP, the chief opposition party to the KMT. When Taiwan became democratic in the 1990s, Chen was one of the most prominent figures in the DPP.
5:58 Speaker 02 In 1994, he became mayor of Taipei.
6:04 Speaker 02 In 2000, to the KMT's horror, he was elected president.
6:09 Speaker 01 The main beef between the KMT and the DPP was that the two parties fundamentally disagreed on the future of Taiwan. Historically, the KMT's position was that Taiwan would one day take back the mainland, whereas the DPP saw Taiwan as an independent sovereign state, its own country, essentially. But while Chen and the DPP believed Taiwan should be independent, they didn't actually declare independence, even when they controlled the entire government.
6:40 Speaker 00 The people of Taiwan live in a fragile state of de facto independence, neither able to declare their independence, nor willing to succumb to China's communist regime.
6:52 Speaker 01 Why the fragile limbo? Why the de facto independence without actually declaring it? Well, the mainland's enormous military exercises simulating an invasion of Taiwan had a little bit to do with it.
7:06 Speaker 02 The Chinese military has stepped up its rhetoric since Chen came to power, making clear it will attack if it feels Taiwan is moving toward a formal declaration of independence.
7:18 Speaker 01 Chen was elected in 2000, but his popularity soon began to slip. And by the time the next election campaign came around in 2004, he was trailing badly in the polls. Because rising tension with the mainland and poor economic performance were making voters consider reverting back to KMT control. His party knew that to shift the dial, they would need to redirect the narrative towards concerns about a mainland invasion and the KMT's dark past. So, on the 28th of February, the anniversary of the 1947 massacre of Taiwanese people by KMT troops,
8:01 Speaker 01 the DPP organised a massive rally, and I mean truly massive. Around 2 million people joined hands to form a 500-kilometre-long human chain from the northern to the southern end of Taiwan as a symbol of resistance against authoritarianism of all kinds. Chen's poll numbers began to turn. But as the election campaign reached the final stages, it became increasingly ugly for both parties.
8:32 Speaker 02 Newspaper ads compared the president to Hitler and urged voters to get rid of the dictator. His wife was accused of insider trading. His opponent's wife was forced to deny that her husband beats her.
8:43 Speaker 01 And then, the day before the election, something happened that turned everything upside down.
8:49 Speaker 02 During a campaign stop in the south of the island, he was either shot or hit by some sort of firecracker. The reports are still mixed, there's still great confusion.
9:02 Speaker 01 Chen had been standing next to his vice presidential candidate in the back of an open-topped car during a rally, when both he and the vice president felt a hot, searing pain, him across his stomach and her across her knee.
9:16 Speaker 02 He was rushed to hospital for emergency treatment, his office later releasing graphic photos of his wounds.
9:22 Speaker 01 Initially, they thought that it was firecrackers, but it wasn't.
9:27 Speaker 02 Two bullets were fired. Police say they do not know who fired them or why.
9:31 Speaker 01 Fortunately, their wounds were superficial and both were able to return to campaigning that same day.
9:37 Speaker 04 I can be knocked down, but the determination of 23 million Taiwanese people to pursue democracy will not be knocked down.
9:45 Speaker 01 The following day, Chen was declared the winner of the election.
9:48 Speaker 02 13 million people cast ballots, but the winning margin was just 30,000 votes.
9:55 Speaker 01 I urge China to respect the decision of the Taiwanese people. We love democracy and we love peace. Now, ideally, the story would end there with the love and the peace. But if democracy was that easy, I'd be out of a job. Truth is, democracy is very messy. It relies as much on the behaviour of the losing party as it does on the result of the election. We all remember what happened in 2020 in the United States, when Donald Trump refused to accept that he had lost Joe Biden. Well, what happened in Taiwan 16 years earlier was surprisingly similar.
10:33 Speaker 01 Chen's nationalist KMT opponent started to raise suspicion that the election eve assassination attempt was not all that it seemed.
10:41 Speaker 04 It is not a fair election. The shooting has never been clearly explained.
10:45 Speaker 01 In Taiwan, there's as much debate and suspicion about the attempted assassination of Chen as there is about the actual assassination of John F Kennedy in the US. Supporters of Chen thought it was a plot by the mainland. His opponents said it was an attempt by Chen to gain a sympathy vote, or...
11:05 Speaker 04 It was a pretext to cover up election fraud.
11:09 Speaker 01 Conspiracy theories and speculation were rife.
11:12 Speaker 05 Now, how could a bullet go straight and then turn around 90 degrees and hit somebody's belly? Then hit another person's knee?
11:19 Speaker 04 I think he lied and he staged the shooting incident. He had to cover up his lie one after another. And it was just like Watergate. The whole thing was most likely fake.
11:31 Speaker 01 By the time the police traced the bullets to the place they'd been purchased, the man who'd bought them was dead in an apparent suicide and his suicide notes had been burned by his family. Nationalist KMT leaders never accepted that it was the work of a lone gunman. We simply believe that the presidency is illegitimate. One half believe he's a crook, the other half believe he's a president. The extraordinary thing about this incident is that while in the US in 2020, the democracy kind of began crumbling after the disputed election, in Taiwan, it didn't. Nobody stormed the girls' high school slash parliament building. The army didn't intervene. The nationalist KMT politicians just went back to work.
12:17 Speaker 01 Disgruntled certainly, but knowing that Chen wouldn't be able to run again in four years, the attitude was, "We'll get him next time", not "Grab your torch and pitchforks and your Viking helmet". There was no need for violence outside the capital in Taipei. And as for allegations of the system being rigged in favour of Chen Shui Biong, well, remember that thing about his wife being accused of corruption?
12:41 Speaker 04 For months now, Taiwan has been rocked by a corruption scandal as complex and bizarre as any soap opera.
12:48 Speaker 01 The president's wife said there was nothing wrong with her use of government expense accounts, but... The prosecutor disagreed, laying charges against the first lady.
12:58 Speaker 02 And two senior presidential aides.
13:02 Speaker 02 He also warned that Chen could be charged when he loses presidential immunity.
13:07 Speaker 01 And the KMT, which was patiently waiting to get them next time, definitely got their wish. Not only did they win the 2008 election, but 14 months later, Chen and his wife had been convicted of corruption and sentenced to prison time. The system worked as designed, and being the former president wasn't enough to make Chen immune.
13:33 Speaker 01 So that's the story of the guy who received the punch. What about Han Goyu from the nationalist KMT, the guy who did the punching? Well, to find out what happened to him, we need to go to the southern tip of Taiwan. The port of Gaoshang. If Taipei was Taiwan's political and financial capital, Gaoshang was its industrial and trade capital. Taiwan's biggest and one of the top three container ports in the world. Gaoshang was a stronghold for the Democratic Progressive Party, Chen's party. The DPP dominated local politics there. DPP figures have occupied the mayor's seat in Gaoshang for two decades. But like many industrial cities in developed countries in the 21st century, Gaoshang began
14:17 Speaker 01 to fall on hard times. Young people struggled to find good jobs and began moving to Taipei for better opportunities. By the mid 2010s, there was an increasing feeling of stagnation, and people started looking for someone to stir things up a bit. Noted head puncher Han Goyu put his hand up to be that someone. Han Goyu has been chosen to run for mayor of the city after a party primary conducted by poll. After the nationalist KMT nominated him for mayor, Han told the voters of Gaoshang it was time for a change. Gaoshang doesn't owe the DPP anything at all. After 20 years, the 20 years the DPP has been in power in Gaoshang.
14:59 Speaker 01 I can sum it up in just four words: outdated and hard up.
15:06 Speaker 01 Han Guoyu had been out of parliament for more than a decade at this point, running a fruit and vegetable wholesale market. He called himself "the bald guy who sells vegetables" to give himself a relatable "normal guy" vibe. But when it came to his actual campaign to boost the economy of the port city, it was anything but normal. He promised that if elected, he would build a "love Ferris wheel", think like the London Eye but each pod is a private motel room. It's for people interested in joining the 10th of a mile high club, if you know what I mean. He also promised that he had secured a deal to get Taiwan's first Disneyland resort opened in Kaohsiung,
15:47 Speaker 01 and that he would bring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Formula One racing, horse racing and casinos to the city. How did he propose to pay for all this? Well, by drilling for oil in the Taiwan Strait off the coast of Kaohsiung, of course.
16:02 Speaker 06 One scholar believes that Han rose to stardom on the strength of personal charisma in a nimble digital campaign. Others say he gained momentum with his promises to stimulate Kaohsiung's economy.
16:15 Speaker 01 And it worked.
16:17 Speaker 05 Han struck a chord with the people of Kaohsiung and redrew the political map, but Han faces a hard road ahead as he works to make good on his promise to revitalise Kaohsiung.
16:26 Speaker 01 Han's victory in Kaohsiung was seismic. Not quite as unexpected as Donald Trump's victory in 2016, but in the same ballpark. A populist, promising things he had no real possibility of delivering. Succeeding in a campaign, he had been given no chance of winning. Needless to say, Arnold Schwarzenegger had no knowledge of the fact that he'd agreed to visit a Taiwanese port city. Disney didn't know they were building a new resort there either, but it didn't seem to matter. While much of Taiwan's media mocked him as a clown, some media outlets began to promote him relentlessly.
17:08 Speaker 01 On the day he was elected, a TV station called CTI TV reported that an auspicious cloud had been seen over Gao Xiang in the shape of a phoenix. CTI also claimed that 800,000 people attended his victory rally, which would be like nearly half the population of Gao Xiang. The real number was probably less than 10% of that. But a guy with that much support and such auspicious meteorology must be on to something. So the KMT decided to try and take Han's vibe national.
17:41 Speaker 06 The KMT's chairman is scheduled to sit down with Gao Xiang Mayor Han next Tuesday. The KMT is considering tailoring its candidate selection process to favour Han.
17:50 Speaker 01 Polling for the upcoming presidential election showed Han leading the incumbent DPP president Tsai Ing-wen 52 to 34. He had been positioning himself not only as a populist, but as a man who could stabilise economic relations with mainland China.
18:06 Speaker 06 President Tsai's main opponent, a city mayor named Han Guoyu, sees better ties with China as a way to kickstart Taiwan's economy.
18:15 Speaker 01 In early 2019, he travelled to the mainland for meetings.
18:19 Speaker 05 During his time across the strait, Han had met Chinese officials. Han had touted his trip as a trade mission.
18:25 Speaker 01 While the DPP carried on about the threat of China and toyed with declaring independence in Taiwan, Han wanted to show that he could build a working relationship with Beijing and keep the status quo. While the majority of Taiwanese people wanted to maintain Taiwan's de facto independence, polls indicated that more and more people were interested in working towards reunification with the mainland in the long term. But all that changed when Chinese President Xi Jinping pulled the rug out from under Han and made him fall flat on his face. It wasn't due to anything that happened in Taiwan or even on the mainland. It was due to something that happened in Hong Kong.
19:05 Speaker 07 A wild brawl has erupted in Hong Kong's parliament over plans to allow suspected criminals to be sent to mainland China for trial.
19:13 Speaker 01 Hong Kong, which did not have a tradition of parliamentary brawls, started emulating Taiwan.
19:20 Speaker 07 Several people were injured, including a pro-democracy MP who attempted to crowd-surf, but fell to the floor and was taken to hospital.
19:29 Speaker 01 At issue was a law that would allow people to be detained in Hong Kong and extradited to mainland China for trial. The fear was that this would be used to crack down on free speech in Hong Kong.
19:40 Speaker 05 This law is like a legal kidnapping, and I don't trust other legal system.
19:46 Speaker 01 The tension wasn't only visible in parliament, it was on the streets of Hong Kong too.
19:51 Speaker 07 Proud and passionate, these Hongkongers are marching in solidarity for one cause:
19:58 Speaker 07 to preserve their freedoms and rule of law.
20:00 Speaker 01 Hong Kong had been under Chinese control for more than 20 years, but had retained democratic freedoms under the One Country, Two Systems Agreement. This agreement was seen as a blueprint for what it might be like for Taiwan to unify with the mainland.
20:15 Speaker 06 While China maintains the threat of military force, it hopes Taiwanese can be persuaded to accept the same One Country, Two Systems deal that Hong Kong has.
20:25 Speaker 01 Now, Beijing was unilaterally altering the deal.
20:29 Speaker 07 Effectively ending the One Country, Two Systems arrangement.
20:32 Speaker 01 In Taiwan, this amendment caused a sudden, dramatic shift in public opinion.
20:40 Speaker 05 The unrest in Hong Kong makes us focus on our democracy, on protecting our independence.
20:46 Speaker 04 And Taiwanese people are seeing all this phenomena, that the Chinese are getting tighter control of Hong Kong.
20:53 Speaker 01 On a chart of opinion polling ahead of the Taiwanese presidential election, you can clearly see the point where large-scale protests broke out in Hong Kong. In April, Han Guo-yu was 18 points ahead of President Tsai. By late June, they were neck and neck, and by October, he was 18 points behind her.
21:13 Speaker 02 President Tsai has cast herself as the defender of this island's democracy, and she's played off the recent unrest in Hong Kong, saying she's best played...
21:22 Speaker 01 To resist China's pressure. Han's outrageous claims and penchant for promising things he had no ability to deliver meant that left-wing media started referring to him as Taiwanese Trump. But he really leant into it and started calling the polls fake and encouraging his supporters to lie if they were called by pollsters.
21:44 Speaker 06 Let's make it so that these fraudulent polling organisations are unable to discern the true answers.
21:49 Speaker 01 In the end, the election result wasn't close at all.
21:53 Speaker 06 Tsai Ing-wen made it clear her thumping victory was a message to Beijing that Taiwanese people won't give in to China's efforts to isolate and marginalise them.
22:03 Speaker 01 As if losing the presidential election wasn't enough of an insult for Han Gou-yu, his support back in Gaoxiong, where he was still the mayor, collapsed.
22:12 Speaker 06 It was clear that the passion that Gaoxiong residents had for the KMT's failed presidential candidate has all but faded.
22:19 Speaker 01 In fact, Han tanked the election so badly that voters also petitioned to sack him from his mayoral office, and they were successful.
22:29 Speaker 07 The KMT's Han Gou-yu has become the first mayor in Taiwan's history to be recalled.
22:34 Speaker 01 97% of voters decided they wanted him gone. It was the first time a Taiwanese mayor had been sacked by voters before their term was even finished. But he wasn't gone for long. The KMT parachuted him back into the National Parliament four years later, in 2024, and appointed him Speaker of the House. In this role, he's helped reshape Taiwan's national policies towards being more friendly with China, including a cut to defence spending.
23:11 Speaker 01 There is still no consensus among Taiwanese people about what they want their country to be in the distant future. Some want to be unified with the mainland, others want independence. But there is a strong consensus about what they want in the short term. It's the same thing they've wanted since polling began in the early 1990s. They want things to stay the same. They want the status quo. They want to live their lives normally, the way they've lived them for decades. In a safe country, enjoying the freedoms they won when they dismantled the KMT-led military dictatorship more than three decades ago. Many think that pursuing independence would threaten their safety.
23:56 Speaker 01 It may lead to war with mainland China. Many think that unifying with mainland China would threaten their freedoms. They saw what happened in Hong Kong. They know what Beijing's promise of "one country, two systems" really means. At a time when voters in many democracies feel like major parties are basically just offering the same thing with different packaging, these two parties are offering a genuine choice. The DPP leans towards independence, while the KMT advocates for closer ties with mainland China. Despite being stuck on an island for nearly eight decades, there are still members of the KMT who don't see mainland China as a separate country.
24:41 Speaker 01 It's just the rest of China. It's still an "us", not a "them". Which explains why earlier this year, Jiang Liwun, the woman who is the presumptive KMT nominee for president in 2028, travelled to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
24:58 Speaker 04 General Secretary Xi Jinping says the meeting is of great significance for developing relations between the two parties and across the Taiwan Strait.
25:07 Speaker 01 And it also explains why back in Taiwan, members of the DPP basically accused her of treason. The thing is that these two parties are kind of in a stalemate. The people of Taiwan aren't committing to either side. They seem to just vote for the party they think will maintain their safety and freedom in the short term. Do we need warmer mainland relations at the moment, or do we need to pull back? For nearly 40 years, the people of Taiwan have done something incredible. They've maintained that status quo. They have stayed out of war. They have retained their freedom. When elections are disputed, the high school doesn't burn down.
25:50 Speaker 01 When politicians are corrupt, they go to jail. When mayors become unpopular, they get sacked. It's a pure display of democracy in a time when those are getting rarer and rarer. Taiwan has a real and vibrant and beautiful democracy. That's despite China's best efforts to unravel it. In the sky and at sea. China's forces have Taiwan surrounded. We'll get into that in the next episode.
26:30 Speaker 01 This episode of If You're Listening was written by Adair Shepherd and me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon. Sound engineer is Anna John. It was produced by Adair Shepherd and Pat Sunderland. Oh, by the way, if you're wondering, that Love Ferris wheel where every pod is a private motel room? Yep, that, that was never built. Sorry.
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