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From Opposition to Power: Taiwan's Democratic Prgressive Party. By SHELLEY RIGGER. Boulder, Colo: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2001. vii, 232 pp. $49.95 (cloth).
On March 18, 2000, 82 percent of Taiwan's eligible voters went to the polls and elected Chen Shui-bian, the candidate of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and a former political prisoner, the president of the Republic of China on Taiwan. This signal event overturned fifty-five years of Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) rule and occurred less than fourteen years after the regime allowed a de facto opposition political party to exist.
In this important book, Shelley Rigger provides a useful perspective of Taiwan political democratization through a sober analysis of Taiwan's second major political party, the DPP. The introductory chapter describes the former authoritarian system and the obstacles and challenges facing the DPP, including its own internal disunity. But a "desire for democracy and the dream of removing the KMT from power" enabled the DPP to make "its greatest and most lasting accomplishment ... its contribution to Taiwan's democratization" (pp. 11-12).
The second chapter provides a brief history of the DPP. Any analysis of the DPP must understand the events and situation prior to the party's formal founding on September 28, 1986, and Rigger's chapter gives a clear overview accounting for most of the key factors. One can question whether the divide between local politicians and dissident intellectuals was so clear-cut, and whether the "differences of opinion between the two groups formed the basis for long-lived factional divisions" (p. 17). This reviewer's impressions are that working relations between the two "groups" were much closer than Rigger suggests, and that substantial factional divisions occurred within each "group." Yet, this chapter provides the best analysis on DPP factions in English that this reviewer has seen.
The third chapter discusses "roadblocks" which the DPP has...