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Learning to Lose:
Party Adaptation and the KMT in Democratic Taiwan
APSA, Washington DC, Sept. 1-4 2005
Joseph Wong
Political Science
University of Toronto
The Kuomintang (KMT) had governed Taiwan uninterrupted beginning in the late
1940s up through the dawning of the twenty-first century. The party governed initially as
an authoritarian party-state, and later as a democratically elected government. Things
changed recently, however. Though it remains one of the richest political parties in the
world and is endowed with formidable mobilizational capacities, the KMT had to
relinquish its hold on governmental power for the first time in 2000. KMT candidate,
Lien Chan, lost the presidential election to the opposition’s Chen Shui-Bian in what was
a three-way race. Former KMT elder James Soong ran as an independent candidate and
won almost 37% of the popular vote, just narrowly losing to Chen who gained around
39%; Soong decimated his former KMT ally Lien, who polled only 23% of the popular
vote. A year later, the KMT lost its majority in the Legislative Yuan when the opposition
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won a plurality of seats. The DPP and the Taiwan
Solidarity Union (TSU) collectively won the ‘pan-green’ alliance a total of 100
legislative seats and 45% of the popular vote, an unprecedented margin in Taiwan’s
democratic politics.
After having dominated the political system in Taiwan for over fifty years, the
former ruling KMT party found itself the opposition party. The KMT’s electoral woes
continued into 2004 when Lien Chan, then running with the populist James Soong under
the ‘pan-blue’ banner, was defeated again by incumbent President Chen, though this time
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