A conservative party pledging to return the country to a glorious imagined past. Massive budget cuts across government ministries. Concerns about foreign influence. An unprecedented challenge of governmental checks and balances as a constitutional crisis looms.
This is not the U.S., but rather is the reality that Taiwan has been grappling with for the past year. With its legislature just opened for spring sessions in late February, Taiwan is preparing for a year of domestic political turbulence. This comes at a time when Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is calling China “the single most significant threat to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific today.”
At the center of the storm is the relationship between the two Chinese political parties that fought a bloody civil war on the other side of the Taiwan Strait eight decades ago.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appears to have achieved a high degree of sway over its old nemesis, the Chinese Nationalist Party, better known as the Kuomintang, or KMT. The two parties’ talking points and agenda are highly aligned today, but this is a new development: they used to be enemies. The KMT seized control of Taiwan (with American help) following Japan’s surrender in 1945—Taiwan, also known as Formosa, had been a Japanese colony between 1895 and 1945. And then, four years later in 1949, KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek relocated the Kuomintang party-state, the Republic of China (ROC), to Taiwan, escaping annihilation in China at the hands of the Communists. For most of the 20th century, the KMT and the CCP were implacable foes, but the return of Taiwanese identity following 38 years of Chinese martial law has helped the two parties find common ground.
Following elections in January 2024, the KMT leads a narrow majority coalition in the Legislative Yuan, the ROC government’s highest law-making body, whose members serve four-year terms—meaning this coalition could last until early 2028. The Legislative Yuan reconvened for its spring session on February 25, when it began to deliberate over the 2025 budget.
The KMT-led coalition initially passed a budget in late January that froze half of the foreign ministry’s budget and half of Taiwan’s indigenous submarine program budget pending legislative review, while reducing funding for military equipment and operations, cybersecurity, and Taiwan’s nascent military drone program. One month earlier, in December, thousands took to the streets in protest against attempts by KMT lawmakers to greatly expand the legislature’s powers to investigate and punish the executive branch while defanging the constitutional court.
Additionally, the KMT has effectively paralyzed the country’s highest court by raising the number of justices required to make a ruling while not approving any nominees to replenish the current insufficient number. In January, students and alumni of National Taiwan University’s College of Law, which has a status similar to Harvard Law School in the U.S., signed a letter opposing the KMT’s attempts to weaken the top court’s ability to issue rulings.
Taiwanese civil society is energized once again, and could turn out in even greater numbers in the coming weeks and months, should the KMT-led coalition decide to further adjust the balance of power within the ROC government it once monopolized.
Out of a total of 113 legislative seats, the KMT holds 52—only one more than the 51 held by President Lai Ching-te’s Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP. But the KMT has formed a majority coalition with two independent lawmakers and eight from the smaller and newer Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The TPP had campaigned on not being aligned with either the KMT or DPP, targeting voters who were fed up with both parties. But since the formation of the coalition one year ago, the TPP has acted in near-lockstep with the KMT.
Despite its slim majority and Lai’s convincing win in the 2024 presidential election, the KMT-TPP coalition has been acting as though it had a strong mandate, claiming that it enjoys broad public support. That claim is undermined, however, by the more than 30 KMT legislators who are now facing recall votes organized by Taiwanese civil society that, should they pass the second stage of petitioning, would take place later this year. If successful, it could lead to the return of the legislative majority to DPP control. As of March 9, campaigns against 31 KMT legislators had entered the second petition stage, during which campaigners must collect signatures from at least 10 percent of registered voters in the recall target’s district within 60 days.
Since February last year, the KMT-led coalition has been pushing an agenda that has clear benefits for Beijing’s goal of absorbing Taiwan. As the KMT and its allies focus legislation on this agenda, the Lai administration is losing precious time in its fight to build up Taiwan’s defenses.
Lai’s cabinet had initially budgeted NT$647 billion ($19.76 billion) for defense for the 2025 fiscal year, roughly 2.45 percent of Taiwan’s GDP. After receiving the original budget proposal from the presidential office last year, the KMT and its partners have moved to cut the defense budget by 1.3 percent, while freezing 13.9 percent, according to government estimates. After a high-level national security meeting, Lai announced on February 14 that he would raise defense spending to more than 3 percent of GDP via a special budget. The move was a signal to the new Trump Administration that Lai is serious about defense—and about reducing Taiwan’s trade surplus with the U.S.
That may not be enough. Earlier this month at the Senate confirmation hearing of Elbridge Colby, Trump’s nominee to serve as under secretary of defense for policy, the nominee Colby called on Taiwan to raise defense spending to 10 percent of its GDP.
During Colby’s hearing, Republican Senator Dan Sullivan accused the KMT of “playing a dangerous game on their defense budget.” ”Cutting defense spending right now is not the right signal,” Sullivan added.
In aggregate, the KMT’s actions over the last year have offered plenty of fodder for concerns that Beijing has become the de facto opposition party in Taiwan. At a time when China’s military presence around Taiwan is growing and Taiwan’s defense and diplomacy are more vital than ever to maintaining its sovereignty, the KMT and company have frozen and appear poised to cut the budgets of the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, among other government departments.
It is unclear how drastic the cuts will be once finalized, let alone when they will be finalized. The coalition is facing a showdown with both the executive branch headed by President Lai, and the Constitutional Court, the ROC’s equivalent of the Supreme Court.
The KMT-led coalition turned its focus on the Constitutional Court last year after its justices ruled that KMT attempts to expand legislative powers to investigate and even imprison members of the executive branch, all the way up to the president, were unconstitutional. The KMT billed the attempt to expand the legislature’s powers as addressing long-needed democratic reforms, yet when the party controlled the executive and legislative branches during the Ma Ying-jeou era (2008-2016), it did not seek to push similar changes.
The KMT has expressed opposition to civil defense groups coordinating with the military in the event of a Chinese attack. It has also pushed to roll back anti-infiltration laws, including restrictions on active or retired military personnel saluting the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and singing the PRC national anthem.
On December 16 last year, KMT legislators instructed their aides to prevent the entry of DPP lawmakers into the legislative chamber, locking the doors. There were scuffles, but DPP legislators were unable to enter before the KMT managed to advance a bill that would make it more difficult to recall politicians. (Taiwan’s recall system allows petitioners who gather signatures from 1 percent of eligible voters to initiate proceedings to remove mayors, city councilors, and other officials from their offices; a successful recall needs majority support in a vote with at least 25 percent turnout.) Four days later, after additional scuffles, the KMT coalition passed the bill into law, despite a protest by more than 15,000 people in cold, wet weather.
The current speaker of the Legislative Yuan is the KMT’s Han Kuo-yu, who on February 10 asked President Lai, who is also DPP chairman, to cancel the “evil recalls.” The recall petitions, however, were not initiated by Lai’s party, but by civil society groups (meanwhile, KMT youth organizations are petitioning for the recall of a dozen DPP lawmakers).
Speaker Han knows about the power of angry Taiwanese voters. In 2020, Han and the KMT suffered a major humiliation when he was overwhelmingly recalled as mayor of the southern port city of Kaohsiung by voters, later replaced by the DPP’s Chen Chi-mai. Only 2.6 percent of the nearly one million Kaohsiung residents who voted opposed Han’s recall. This was largely viewed as a referendum on Han’s overtly pro-China stance and meetings with CCP officials in China after taking office.
Almost immediately after taking office as Kaohsiung’s mayor in 2019 Han traveled to China to meet with Taiwan Affairs Office director Liu Jieyi in Shenzhen. Han also met with top CCP officials in Hong Kong and Macau behind closed doors. The meetings came shortly after a speech by Xi Jinping calling for a “one country, two systems” framework similar to those in Hong Kong and Macau to facilitate Taiwan being absorbed by the PRC.
During the presidency of Lai’s predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, when the DPP enjoyed an outright parliamentary majority from 2016 through 2023, the Kuomintang tended to defend the sovereignty of the Republic of China government that they brought to Taiwan in 1945. Things have changed, with senior party figures calling for unification. Given the cross-strait balance of power, it is implausible that Xi would entertain the thought of unification under any government other than the PRC.
In a recent interview with Japanese media, senior KMT legislator Weng Hsiao-ling was frank about her party’s objectives. She told Nikkei Asia that “the peaceful unification of this country is of course our ultimate goal.” Even though there “may be no way to achieve this immediately,” she continued, “cross-strait communication and interaction” can help achieve this objective.
In her interview, Weng asserted that all Taiwanese people are Chinese. Yet poll after poll by National Chengchi University (NCCU) in Taiwan, originally founded in China a century ago as the KMT’s party school, show that Taiwanese respondents see things differently. In the university’s most recent survey, 94.4 percent of respondents said they identified as either Taiwanese or Taiwanese and Chinese. Of that supermajority, nearly two-thirds said they viewed themselves as Taiwanese exclusively. Only 2.4 percent of respondents said they felt they were Chinese only, with 3.2 percent declining to answer.
NCCU polling has also found that Taiwanese overwhelmingly reject unification with the PRC. Only 1.1 percent of respondents to a similar poll from late last year sought unification as soon as possible, with 5.8 percent favoring maintaining the status quo and moving towards eventual unification. On the other side of the lopsided spectrum, 34.1 percent favored maintaining the status quo—effective independence—indefinitely. Another 26.4 preferred keeping the status quo and deciding later, while 22.5 percent said they wanted to keep things as they are for now, with the eventual goal of doing away with the ROC and establishing a Taiwanese state.
Weng’s statements drew heavy criticism from the general public, but the KMT did not distance itself from them.
Last April, while the Legislative Yuan was in session and less than a month before Lai would be sworn in as president, the leader of the KMT legislative caucus, Fu Kun-chi, took a delegation of 17 KMT lawmakers to Beijing, where they met with Wang Huning, Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and Song Tao, Director of the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office. Weng was a delegation member.
Wang Huning, whom the New York Times reported has been entrusted by Xi Jinping with his Taiwan strategy, stressed the importance of upholding Beijing’s one China principle, stating “We are all Chinese and are one family as parts of the Chinese people.”
Upon his return to Taipei, Fu, as leader of the KMT legislative caucus, focused on the expansion of legislative powers, while also pushing to replace mentions of “China” in the legislature to “the mainland,” relax aspects of an anti-infiltration law, and make it easier for Chinese spouses of Taiwan citizens to obtain citizenship—and by extension, voting rights.
During a June exchange in the legislature, a fired-up Fu demanded that Lai stop calling Taiwan and China separate countries, citing the ROC constitution as proof that they are part of the same country, with Taiwan the “free area” and China as the “mainland area.” Since its relocation from China to Taiwan in the late 1940s, the KMT has always maintained that the two sides of the strait belong to the same country—the ROC, not the PRC. During the Cold War days, the party forbade Taiwanese to engage in any contact with the CCP, whom it commonly referred to as “Communist bandits.” Now, as its relations with the CCP are closer than ever, the party that once defended the institutions of its beloved Republic of China is seeking to dramatically change them.
After Fu’s trip to China, the KMT introduced a raft of bills that would have made the Legislative Yuan the most powerful of the five branches of the government, which also include the Executive, Judicial, Control, and Examination Yuans established in 1928 in the ROC capital of Nanjing. Pro-unification lawmaker Weng Hsiao-ling was one of three KMT legislators who submitted a bill that would have made being found in contempt of the legislature a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. Contempt, of course, would be defined by the legislature. This attack on the government’s checks and balances highlights just how much Taiwanese politics have changed since democratization in the 1990s.
The DPP was founded—illegally—in 1986, one year before the end of 38 years of KMT martial law in Taiwan. The party’s predecessor, the Tangwai movement, aimed to overthrow the ROC government, which persecuted its members via the ROC military and courts. In an ironic twist, it is now the DPP that is fighting to protect ROC institutions from the KMT. The DPP is also the party seeking to boost the morale of the ROC military as the KMT seeks to reduce military spending while denigrating what was once its armed wing. KMT politicians, including former president Ma Ying-jeou, frequently argue that military resistance to China is futile. Early last year, Ma told German media that Taiwan “can never win” a war with China.
Weng’s bill was shot down by the ROC Constitutional Court, which is now in the KMT-led coalition’s sights. The coalition seeks to raise the number of justices needed to pass a ruling to 10, but the court currently has only eight sitting justices, and the KMT’s coalition has rejected nominations for new justices to fill the court, which has no minimum number of justices required but recently has had 15. In a rare protest by Taiwan’s legal sector, more than 300 lawyers took to the streets last November to protest the plan.
Longtime DPP legislator Wang Ting-yu, who co-chairs the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, told me that he’s never seen the KMT as in-step with Beijing as he had in the last year. Wang himself is currently the target of a KMT-organized recall vote.
“The CCP is using its vast resources to secure control of key persons in the KMT,” Wang said.
“Through those people they can exert control over the Legislative Yuan and inflict damage upon Taiwan’s democracy,” he added. “Now Beijing can guide legislators to pass or eliminate laws in a way that helps China.”
Among the weapons in the CCP’s arsenal to influence the KMT, Wang said, were “business favors, meetings with top Chinese officials, and kompromat.”
To Wang, the most important person in Beijing’s courting of the KMT is Fu Kun-chi, who has emerged as its most powerful member.
Fu is not known for subtlety or playing by the rules. Nicknamed “the King of Hualien” for his long-term prominence in the eastern county, Fu has been convicted of stock manipulation, insider trading, and other crimes. While in prison in 2018, he found himself at the center of a separate controversy when local media broke the story that he had been paying reporters from 14 local media outlets for positive coverage.
But last year was Fu’s moment. His April trip to China presaged a slew of KMT initiatives and talking points that align with Beijing’s goals in Taiwan. Shortly after Chinese military exercises around Taiwan following the inauguration of Lai Ching-te as president, Fu didn’t criticize Chinese belligerence, but instead accused Lai of trying to provoke a war.
“We hope to restore the great exchanges, great prosperity, great peace and great cooperation between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait before 2016,” Fu told Wang Huning in Beijing during his April visit. “Not only do we have the same culture, the same race, the same blood, and the same ancestors, we speak the same language, we read the same books.”
Fu’s Chinese ethno-nationalist rhetoric in front of the man overseeing Xi’s effort to subsume Taiwan has many Taiwanese worried, from the thousands of protestors outside the legislature in mid-December to Wang Ting-yu the legislator.
“Fu Kun-chi is 100 percent an advocate for the CCP,” Wang said.
Fu and Weng Hsiao-ling are not alone in pushing for Taiwan to get closer into China’s orbit. KMT lawmaker Jessica Chen Yu-jen approved of the idea at a recent on-the-record event with the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents’ Club.
“If we move closer to mainland China, mainland China may become stronger and stronger, and it may be able to compete with the U.S.,” Chen said. “The U.S. should be afraid that Taiwan will shift to China’s side.”
Beijing has cut off direct contact with Taipei since 2016, insisting that Taiwan’s president endorse the notion that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. This was a clear non-starter for Tsai Ing-wen, Lai Ching-te, and the rest of the DPP, but resonates with the KMT faithful—roughly one-fifth of voters. Shifts within the KMT itself may be making it more amenable than before to Beijing’s overtures.
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“The KMT is dominated today by political machines based on clientelism in more marginal parts of Taiwan,” Michael Fahey, an American lawyer and Taipei-based commentator, said.
These machines are united around Fu. Their present goal, Fahey said, is “to pass laws changing the separation of powers so that Taiwan’s political order is dominated by the legislature rather than the executive.”
An important part of this is to free the legislature from judicial review by defanging the Constitutional Court, Fahey added. For KMT legislators like Fu, that would in turn make it easier to re-allocate state finances to vastly increase local government funding and start huge infrastructure projects that benefit their home districts.
But even prominent members of the old guard such as Ma have changed. During the Cold War, the KMT party-state vehemently opposed both the CCP and Taiwanese self-determination. Today the party only seems to oppose Taiwanese self-determination, and the CCP has a high-profile signal booster in Ma.
In the days before China’s large-scale exercises around Taiwan last December, the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation led a group of more than 30 Chinese students and teachers on a nine-day exchange visit. When the group visited National Taiwan University (NTU), they were greeted by protesting Taiwanese students shouting slogans including “NTU students love freedom!” and “We want equal exchanges!” They also held signs saying “Support China’s democratization!” and “Support democracy and freedom in Hong Kong.”
Eric Chu, the KMT chairman, responded to criticism of the delegation’s visit by saying it would “strengthen the cross-strait relationship.” When pressed about media reports citing Taiwanese intelligence that the entirety of the Chinese group were members of either the CCP or Communist Youth League, Chu said that it should “in fact not be at all surprising.”
The fact that the KMT chairman seemed to be acknowledging and shrugging off a CCP activity coordinated with Ma, the former president of the ROC, is instructive. It also highlights Ma’s unique role as a KMT member who does not hold office or actual power, but is viewed by Beijing as a symbol of the era in which PRC influence in Taiwan had the fewest obstacles.
As the most recognizable KMT member and the party’s only president elected this century, Ma is able—and more than willing—to engage in high-profile gestures that advance both KMT and CCP goals in Taiwan. His role as a quasi-diplomat is as helpful to Beijing’s propaganda as it is to the central Taiwanese political machines that are reshaping the KMT.
“The powerful families who run these machines are happy to let Ma Ying-jeou do the unpopular work of pushing for engagement and economic integration with China for now,” says Fahey, the lawyer and commentator.
Prior to last January’s election, Ma told German broadcaster DW that “unification is actually acceptable to Taiwan,” and that Taiwan has to trust Xi Jinping. Contrary to Ma’s assertion, survey data from National Chengchi University shows that fewer than 7 percent of respondents favored unification, now or later.
In April last year, Ma made an 11-day visit to China, where he met with Xi and said: “The Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait will definitely have enough wisdom to handle cross-strait disputes peacefully and avoid conflicts.”
Ma has clear value to China for its domestic narrative of Taiwanese society being pro-unification. But Beijing also appears to be using Ma to influence Taiwanese public opinion. A recent scandal involved a Xinhua reporter from China who was allegedly helping guide coverage at a Taiwanese TV news network. According to a Taipei Times report, promotion of Ma’s cross-strait policies and April meeting with Xi were of special interest to the National Communications Commission.
For Taiwan democracy activists and DPP politicians—many of whom could be subject to trial in absentia and death sentences under new Chinese “anti-secession” legislation—the frequent meetings between the KMT and CCP are worrisome. But for observers in both Taiwan and the U.S., such meetings may provide a useful look into a closed-off Beijing’s views.
“I do not think that KMT members meeting with high-level CCP officials is a bad thing,” Kharis Templeman, who manages the Hoover Institution’s Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region, told me.
“In my view, the most likely pathway to a cross-Strait war is fundamental misunderstanding of the other side’s intentions,” Templeman said. “I worry a lot that Beijing has a poor understanding of trends in Taiwan, and that many Taiwanese—and Americans too—have a poor understanding of Beijing’s Taiwan policy.”
“It would obviously be best if the CCP would talk directly to the DPP, and vice versa,” Templeman added. “And KMT members will obviously present a slanted view of trends in Taiwan to their PRC interlocutors. But we can all still learn something from these interactions: at a minimum, who in Beijing meets with them, what they talk about, how well informed Wang Huning is—these are all valuable data points.”
The KMT’s International Affairs Department told me in a statement that KMT meetings with CCP officials were aimed at helping Taiwanese businesspeople in China, getting restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural and seafood exports to China lifted, as well as “advocating peace, promoting understanding of young generations on both sides, and reducing tensions across the Taiwan Strait.”
“We believe those meetings are helpful to the interests of the Taiwanese people when they cannot rely on the DPP government,” the KMT’s statement added. “The KMT is not ‘cooperating with’ but rather ‘dealing with’ Beijing to defend our interests, reduce tension, prevent crisis, and prolong peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, so as to earn more time to build up our military deterrence capability.”
* * *
On December 18, at least 2,000 protestors gathered outside the Kuomintang’s headquarters in northern Taipei. Increasingly larger protests took place outside the Legislative Yuan the following two days, drawing as many as 10,000 and more than 15,000 demonstrators, respectively.
Outside KMT headquarters, as protest chants demanded the recall of KMT politicians including Fu Kun-chi, Weng Hsiao-ling, and others, I spoke with Kuo Chun-Yi, a 29 year-old student from the southern port city of Kaohsiung. Kuo said he has no doubt that Taiwan is not China—and no doubt that the KMT is doing Beijing’s bidding.
“When Xi Jinping says something, the KMT is soon saying the same thing,” Kuo said. “This is not a coincidence.”
As a 19-year-old in 2014, Kuo participated in the Sunflower protests that blocked a bill negotiated in secret between the Xi and Ma administrations. It would have made Taiwan’s service sector—more than 60 percent of GDP at the time—wide open to Chinese investment. A decade later, Kuo is coming out to protest the KMT-CCP agenda once again.
“I feel very tired,” Kuo told me with a weary laugh. “Ten years ago, we had to occupy the Legislative Yuan, and now it feels like we’ll have to do the same thing again.”