12/12/21, 20:39 The Glorious Contradictions of Lee Teng-hui – The Diplomat

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The Glorious
Contradictions of Lee
Teng-hui
Throughout his 97 years, Lee took on
multiple identities as a Japanese,
Communist, Chinese, Christian, and,
finally, Taiwanese independence
activist – matching the island’s many
changes.

By James Baron
August 18, 2020

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In this March 6, 2005, file photo, former Taiwan’s President Lee

Teng-hui gives a symbolic “push away” to Beijing’s plan to pass
the anti-secession legislation during a large rally of pro-Taiwan
supporters in the southern port city of Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Credit: AP Photo/Wally Santana

“It was one of the few days in my life when I wore a suit,”
remembers Hans Breuer.

Back in 1996, Breuer, then a freelance translator, was contacted to

work as an interpreter for German TV network ZDF, which was in
Taiwan to cover the first-ever democratic presidential election in a
Chinese-speaking country.

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More likely to be seen in shorts and sneakers at the time, Breuer

opted for a makeover. “Considering the importance of the occasion,
I thought I’d better make an effort,” says Breuer, who arrived in
Taiwan in 1989.

The election of Lee Teng-hui, who died July 30, was a tension-
fraught affair. China had been hostile for months prior. Having fired
missiles toward the port city of Keelung in July the preceding year,
conducted similarly menacing “tests” the following month and naval
exercises in November, Beijing resumed its belligerence in the week
leading up to the election. More missiles were launched, landing
near Keelung, again, and off the coast of Taiwan’s second city
Kaohsiung in the south. It was a warning: a vote for Lee, Taiwan’s
first native-born president, spelled trouble.

“It was supposed to intimidate people,” says Breuer, who spent

election day interviewing voters. “But it totally backfired.” This
assessment was backed by polls showing a 5 percent spike in
support for Lee.

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Beijing’s ire arose from a perceived shift by Lee, if not toward

outright independence, then away from a “one-China” position. This
apprehension stretched back to Lee’s first major constitutional
reform – the abolition of the laws that had kept Taiwan under
martial law for over 40 years.

Officially referred to by the unwieldy designation “Temporary

Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for
Suppression of the Communist Rebellion,” the act was used to justify
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the abuses of the White Terror period. Lee’s decision to end it was a
watershed.

Yet the significance of the decision ran deeper. For, in maintaining

the fiction of an ongoing civil war, the provisions helped define
cross-strait relations; their abolition caused surprise and confusion
on both sides.

Initially, the move might have been welcomed by Beijing as

confirming the Communist “victory,” reinforcing the argument that
Taipei was submitting to their authority. However, in one of the
many ironies that has marked the metamorphosis of the Chinese
Nationalist Party (KMT) from Beijing’s bitter foe to its fawning
bedfellow, Chinese officials soon sensed something more alarming
afoot.

By scrapping the provisions, Lee – a Taiwanese with no affinity for

China – had removed legislation that, however tenuously, tethered
Taiwan to the “mainland.” If Lee was dropping claims to authority
over China, what did that suggest about the entity known as the
Republic of China?

At the press conference announcing the decision on April 30, Lee

was careful with his language, making frequent references to “the
Chinese nation,” “a reunified China,” “the National Unification
Guidelines,” and “the one-China policy.” He criticized “those who
advocate playing the Taiwan independence card,” insisting activism
was “not home grown … but rather stems from our isolation in the
international community caused by the Chinese Communists.” It
was a curious claim.

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Yet, despite employing “reunificationist” rhetoric, Lee’s hedging was

beginning to cause concern. When asked how Taiwanese should
now view China, Lee said, “Both sides of the Straits should not deny
the other as a political entity.”

Amendments facilitating direct elections for the National Assembly

followed in December 1991 after the Wild Lily student protests of
March 1990. A vestige of the “mainland era,” which guaranteed the
“old thieves” legislative seats and handsome salaries, the assembly
was an obvious target for democracy activists.

With dissatisfaction at the pace of the reforms continuing, in 1994,

Lee began the process that led to the assembly’s eventual
dissolution, removing its power to elect the president and vice
president. That same year, he opened the mayoralties of Taipei and
Kaoshiung to direct elections.

However, it was Lee’s actions the following summer that set the
stage for the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. Thanks to the efforts of the
renowned lobbyists Cassidy & Associates, at a reported $1.5 million
per year, Lee secured almost unanimous support from Congress for
a visit to speak at Cornell University, where he had earned his
doctorate in agricultural economics in 1968.

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Despite State Department misgivings, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton

granted Lee a visa waiver for a 3-day stopover in a private capacity,
with the strict understanding that there would be no fanfare or
media interaction. Press conferences or no, with 4,000 attendees and
400 international journalists present, the event was hardly
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clandestine. A major coup for Lee, it had Chinese officials

fulminating. Admonishments, diplomatic and economic, spewed
forth.

Foreign Minister Qian Qichen summoned U.S. Ambassador J.

Stapleton Roy for a tongue-lashing, and the closure of the U.S.
consulate in Chengdu was mooted. (Coincidentally, Beijing made
good on this threat in July 2020, following its latest trade spat with
Washington.). Meanwhile, Defense Minister Chi Haotian put a visit
to Washington on ice.

Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily joined the

chorus of howls, with an editorial predicting Clinton would “pay a
price” for “jeopardizing Sino-U.S. relations.” The piece apparently
meant this literally, as doubt was subsequently cast on a deal for
Boeing jet airliners.

Even the author of the “One China” policy weighed in. “Highly
reckless and provocative” was how Henry Kissinger described Lee’s
visit.

Lee’s 40-minute speech is often portrayed as anodyne, yet the

subtlest sleights of tongue had long signposted important shifts in
the cross-strait dialogue. It was therefore unsurprising that Lee’s
decision to refer to “the Republic of China on Taiwan” for the first
time caused consternation. A redoubled furor ensued following an
interview with German radio in 1999 in which he introduced the
notion of “state-to-state relations.” (The English translation on
government websites was originally “country-to-country,” but this
was quickly altered to the less controversial formulation at the
behest of the Mainland Affairs Council.)

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Taken by surprise, the KMT’s One China stalwarts began to wonder

if Lee’s diversion from the script signified incaution or something
altogether worse. Foremost among the detractors was Hau Pei-tsun,
who had served as Lee’s premier from 1990 to 1993 but who, as a
member of the “palace faction,” had never trusted him. Hau now
campaigned against Lee as running mate to independent Lin Tang-
kang, a former KMT vice chairman and head of the Judicial Yuan.

Hau, who died at age 100 in March, played up his military

background and Lee’s lack thereof to suggest that his opponent was
not cut out for such a volatile stand-off and risked embroiling
Taiwan in a cross-strait war. On the eve of the election, the People’s
Daily echoed this, claiming Lee’s actions “pushed Taiwan’s people
toward the abyss of catastrophe.”

Yet for all the talk of impetuosity, Lee appeared unflappable. “Lee
consistently displayed his calm manner … [and] thus effectively
tempered voter unrest,” biographer Shih-Shan Henry Tsai writes.
This was reflected in polls suggesting 800,000 voters switched
support from Peng Ming-min, the candidate for the opposition
Democratic Progressive Party, to Lee.

Emboldened by this endorsement of his approach, Lee moved

forward post-election. His convening of a National Development
Council in late 1996, and subsequent adoption of its
recommendations to suspend elections for the Provincial
Government in 1998, signaled the end of another cumbersome civil
war relic.

It also irreparably ruptured Lee’s relationship with James Soong,

whose position as governor was rendered obsolete. Soong, who had

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once referred to relationship with Lee as a father-son bond, believed

he had been deliberately sidelined; this was confirmed when Lee
selected  Lien Chan as presidential candidate for the 2000 election, a
move that opponents claimed condemned the KMT to failure against
the Democratic Progressive Party’s Chen Shui-bian. For party
hardliners, the snake had now fully emerged from the grass.

In later years, Lee became something of a comical figure to a

younger generation who saw in his frequently contradictory
outbursts the ravings of a confused has-been. It was hard to imagine
such a person had ever been capable of dispassionate calculation.
Even those who knew him well began to impute his erratic
comments to instability or caprice borne of an absence of core
values. Many believed “Lee’s pattern of changing beliefs and
personality” was for expediency, writes Tsai.

Throughout his 97 years, a period of immense changes to Taiwan’s

sociopolitical landscape, Lee showed an uncanny ability to emerge
unscathed from potentially catastrophic scrapes.

As a young Japanese, he remained an obedient subject, but flirted

with liberalism and Marxism. In 2002, he admitted to having briefly
held Chinese Communist Party membership just as the February 28
uprising of 1947 was flaring up (though he later denied being a
signed-up member).

During the same period, Lee claimed to have attended meetings of

the Settlement Committee in Taipei. This ad hoc convention was
formed by leading Taiwanese professionals and intellectuals to
negotiate a peaceful resolution to the turmoil engulfing the country.
Lee claimed to have refrained from speaking as he suspected KMT

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tolerance of the gatherings was a ploy to smoke out dissenters. This

proved prescient as most of those who made their voices heard
suffered arrest and, in many cases, worse.

On his return to Taiwan from Cornell in 1964, Lee was interrogated

by the dreaded Taiwan Garrison Command, then hauled in again in
1968. Yet, three years later he became a KMT member and quickly
earned the trust of President Chiang Ching-kuo. A notoriously tough
judge, Chiang certainly knew about Lee’s past but, in Tsai’s words,
“felt in Lee a calm and reliable personality, who was unconstrained
by ethnicity, occupation, or rank.”

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While “happenstance,” as Tsai puts it, may occasionally have played

a role, it is inconceivable that Lee navigated the pitfalls he faced
through blind luck.

Among his wiles, there were unsavory characteristics, most notably

his courtship of “black and gold” organized crime. Other
shortcomings included his failure to promote women to his cabinets,
his undemocratic manipulation of the law to consolidate his own
power (in the name of democracy), and his initial dismissal of calls
to address White Terror abuses.

In a frank eulogy published in the Taipei Times, Lee’s old friend,

university peer, and one-time rival Peng summed up Lee’s
predicament thus: “As a Taiwanese, he wanted to safeguard and
enhance Taiwanese’s political rights and push for democratization.
As KMT chairman, he had to sacrifice certain basic human rights for

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the sake of unification. He was constantly struggling with this

dilemma.”

In a similar vein, Tsai has described Lee as “full of contradictions

and confusions,” likening him to antiheroes of Dostoevsky, with
whom he had a youthful fascination.

Perhaps it is these idiosyncrasies, expressed through his multiple

identities as a Japanese, Communist, Chinese, Christian and, latterly,
Taiwanese independence activist, that mark Lee out as a true Son of
Taiwan – a title his successor Chen Shui-bian liked to use. For
nothing captures the spirit of the island-nation better than such
inconsistency.

That can be seen in KMT candidate Han Kuo-yu’s landslide in the

2018 mayoral election, which prised open the Democratic
Progressive Party’s 20-year grip on the city, and in Han’s recall 18
months later. It is evident in the love-hate attitudes Taiwan exhibits
toward East Asian neighbors Japan and South Korea, which veer
between idol worship and xenophobia-tinged inferiority complex.
And it’s there in the social values that move from all-in-together
civility to rat-race self-interest in a matter of moments. It is Taiwan
in all its muddled, sometimes frustrating, sometimes delightful,
never lackluster glory.

To his detractors, Lee was, if not a snake, then a chameleon,

changing colors as circumstances dictated. For Hans Breuer, who
now runs a successful translation agency from his home in Sanzhi
district, rural New Taipei city, a stone’s throw from where Lee was
born, it was never that simple. “There’s never either black or white”
says Breuer, an amateur herpetologist, who spends his spare time

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prowling the undergrowth for evasive reptiles. “Historians can

argue about his character and agenda till kingdom come, but no one
can deny his importance.”

James Baron is a Taipei-based writer.

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Features Politics East Asia Taiwan Lee Teng-hui Taiwan democracy Taiwan identity

Taiwan politics

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