With President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on Monday, the curtain has fallen on the era of former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文).
According to a recent public opinion poll, 42 percent of respondents expressed overall satisfaction with the Tsai administration. Compared with the 23 percent final approval rate for Tsai’s predecessor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) eight years ago and the 29 percent rate for Ma’s predecessor Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) 16 years ago, Tsai’s score demonstrates the high regard that the public has for her governance.
This widespread approval for the “Tsai era” is due to numerous factors, both local and foreign, along with social changes. They also include Tsai’s individual qualities, personality and style of doing things, especially her temperament and qualifications as a leader and her policy orientations. It would be no exaggeration to say that Tsai has displayed the best leadership qualities among Taiwan’s presidents since Lee Teng-hui (李登輝).
We can identify three key factors that enabled Tsai to hand over the baton with honor.
The first factor is her outstanding ability to withstand pressure. In most democracies, as long as leaders are voted into office through a fair electoral process, their legitimacy is not questioned. However, Taiwan’s status has always been denied by the Chinese government in Beijing. As soon as any president takes office in Taiwan, they become a target of suspicion for the other side of the Taiwan Strait and subject to China’s intimidation.
Tsai has never conceded to Beijing’s demand that she should accept the so-called “1992 consensus,” under which the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese government supposedly agreed there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of “China.” Tsai’s rejection of this “consensus” made it inevitable that she would be under pressure for each and every day of her presidency.
However, right from the start of Tsai’s first term in office, she established the principle of no provocation and no aggression to deal with Taiwan’s thorniest problem — cross-strait relations — and stuck to that principle throughout her presidency. Consequently, China has never tried to label her a “diehard Taiwan independence separatist.” Although China has refused to engage in dialogue with Tsai during the past eight years, and its warplanes and warships have occasionally crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, she has successfully avoided war, and the two sides have basically maintained the pre-existing “status quo.”
The second key factor is that Tsai is forward-looking and decisive. With an eye to getting re-elected and avoiding a loss of votes during her first term in office she took the safe approach of steering clear of controversial issues. However, Tsai did boldly tackle the issue of pension reform, which was not solved during the presidency of her predecessor Ma, and by doing so, she was not afraid to offend the entrenched interest group of military personnel, civil servants and teachers. She also did not shy away from the equally controversial issue of same-sex marriage.
Tsai’s forward-looking policy formulation and her decisiveness on difficult issues, even when policies were hard to implement and detracted from her approval ratings, eventually won applause and were repaid by popular support.
In a recent opinion poll conducted by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation, 50 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with her government’s performance with respect to pension reforms for military personnel, civil servants and teachers, while 36 percent were dissatisfied. Furthermore, 50 percent said they approved of the government’s promotion of the legalization of same-sex marriage, while 43 percent disapproved.
The third factor is Tsai’s ability to calmly manage crises. For example, in 2022, then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in spite of China’s objections, triggering the “fourth Taiwan Strait crisis.” Tsai remained calm and responded steadily. Although the Taiwan Strait situation remained stormy, she managed to fairly quickly calm the crisis and prevent it from escalating.
Another example took place after Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was badly beaten in the 2018 “nine-in-one” local government elections, in response to which she resigned from her post as chair of the DPP. At the time, most people thought that Tsai had no chance of being re-elected to a second term as president. Even more thrilling was when her former premier, William Lai (賴清德), challenged her in the DPP’s primary vote for the 2020 presidential election, but Tsai eventually employed her outstanding crisis-management skills to turn her prospects around by first beating Lai in the primary and then inviting him to be her running mate in the presidential election.
Tsai might not be perfect, but she adhered to a stable, calm restrained and non-aggressive style of doing things.
Although she did not start out from the DPP, she has managed to find a balance between the forces within the party. Furthermore, from the somewhat disadvantaged position of being a woman, Tsai has undoubtedly set an example for leaders. Taiwan will surely miss this most outstanding president of the 21st century and look back fondly on the “Tsai era.”
John Lim is a project researcher at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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