Taiwan’s Parliamentary Coup

This piece is by Stéphane Corcuff, a lecturer in contemporary Chinese world politics at the Institute of Political Studies in Lyon and a researcher at the Centre d’études Linguistiques, Langues Sociétés Corpus, at Jean Moulin University Lyon 3, and Tai-Jan Chiu (邱泰然), who holds a degree in Area Studies (Regionalstudien Asien/Afrika) from the Institute for Asian and African Studies (Institut für Asien-Afrikawissenschaften) at Humboldt-University, Berlin.

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On May 28 afternoon, the Legislative Yuan (LY) in Taipei (the Taiwanese Parliament) passed in a third reading several amendments to the organic law which determines the perimeter of the Legislative Yuan’s powers. The amendments significantly increased the LY’s control over the President and the government. Holding a slim parliamentary majority, the two opposition parties managed to get Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators elected to the positions of Speaker and Vice Speaker, as well as chair of the key Judicial and Legislative Affairs Committee. This paved the way for the alliance to de facto modify the deliberation process in order to speed up the adoption of the alliance’s legislations.

One might have expected the term of Lai Ching-te (William Lai), the Taiwanese president elected on January 13, 2024, and inaugurated on May 20, to follow in the footsteps of Tsai Ing-wen’s terms (2016-2024). It seemed likely that the new government, coming from the same party as Tsai, of whom Lai was the vice president, would continue those of the reforms that President Tsai had not completed.

But the legislative results from the same day immediately changed the outlook. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), retaining the executive leadership, lost its absolute majority in the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s Parliament—something it had secured under Tsai’s presidency for the first time since Taiwan’s democratization began in the 1990s. The two opposition parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT, the old authoritarian ruling party of Taiwan and favoring closer ties with Beijing) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), gained a few additional seats, but not enough to each achieve an absolute majority on their own.

This near-equal representation of Taiwan’s two main parties (51 seats for the ruling DPP and 52 for the KMT), with the TPP (8 seats) as the arbiter, was an unprecedented configuration. This situation instantly recalled the one faced by the first opposition president, Chen Shui-bian (2000-2008). During his eight years in power, his party, the DPP, has never secured an absolute parliamentary majority: it had been kept by the KMT ever since the first chamber was elected in 1948. The KMT successfully managed to block reforms programmes and arms purchases from the United States at the legislature. This was not a good omen for the opening of the mandate of the newly elected President Lai.

A president without a parliamentary majority

From the outset of the new parliamentary session, it was clear that the DPP could not count on the TPP’s eight votes to get an absolute majority, as the KMT and the TPP parliamentary groups rapidly opened negotiations in order to prevent DPP legislators being elected speaker and vice-speaker (the two had been discussing some form of cooperation since March 2023). The cooperation was originally for a joint presidential ticket, but the process was chaotic and unsuccessful. It named by Taiwan’s media a Blue-White Cooperation (藍白合), after the two colors attributed to those parties. 

The KMT legislator who was elected as Speaker, Han Kuo-yu, had been briefly the mayor of the southern city of Kaohsiung after December 2018, before being impeached by popular vote in January 2020, following a continuous series of scandals revealing his incompetence regarding major municipal issues. Once the KMT had secured Han’s presidency of the Parliament and a KMT member for the convener of the Judicial and Legislative Affairs Committee, KMT and TPP legislators quickly launched a series of amendments to the LY’s Organic Law governing the powers and functioning of the parliament (立法院職權行使法 Lifa Yuan zhiquan xingshi fa), aimed ostensibly at significantly strengthening parliamentary control over government activities. This came together, as the following events would quickly show, with the desire to prioritize their own legislative proposals and to try to prevent DPP-initiated bills from reaching plenary session discussions. 

The KMT-TPP’s “Reform of parliament” (國會改革, guohui gaige) began on February 20 and concluded on May 28, with the final result being the adoption of the revised law on legislative debate and voting procedures, parliamentary powers, and amendments to the Criminal Code, notably creating a crime of “contempt of Parliament.”

Crisis mechanism

How did the course of the event unfold from the beginning of the legislative session to the end of May? 

On Feb. 20, TPP legislators proposed first the amendments to the above-mentioned organic law, which echoed the proposition made by the KMT during the legislative election campaign to “reform the parliament”. In early March, KMT legislators proposed an extension of the powers of the legislative body, proposing to institute an annual Report on the state of the nation by the President before the LY. This would make the president subject to parliamentary questioning. 

Neither the report on the state of the nation, nor the right for the legislature to question the President, had previously existed in the constitutional practice of the Republic of China (Taiwan). The regime was originally designed with a dual-head executive system, in which the President, originally, did not have much executive power by the letter of the constitution, and thus was not supposed to report before the legislature. 

In practice, the KMT’s Chiang Kai-shek certainly had a lot of power, but that was due for a part to his immense political influence over the party and the state, and for another part to the 1948 suspension of constitutional articles during the war with the Chinese Communist Party, which were lifted only in 1991. However, with the democratization of Taiwan, several constitutional revisions were engineered, and the President was able to gain more effective power while still not being subject to questions by the legislature. It is important to keep this in mind when we try to understand the frustration of the KMT after losing five of the eight direct presidential elections to the DPP since the democratization of Taiwan, and the last three ones consecutively (2016, 2020, 2024).

Together with this proposal, an attempt was also launched to extend the parliament’s investigative and hearing powers (summoning any individual or entity) to inform the parliament, and to create a crime of “contempt of Parliament” (藐視國會, miaoshi guohui), which was criticized by the DPP as ambiguous and limitless. On March 1, a hearing of Chen Chien-jen, then-Premier of President Tsai’s administration, was held. During the hearing, KMT legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin aggressively accused the Premier of an attitude of “opposing the legislative hearing”, adding that the relationship between the executive and the legislature was one of subordination of the former to the latter. Chen questioned this vision and asked the Speaker about his opinion, who, surprised and with no answer, avoided to respond. Scholars immediately confirmed that Hsu had a wrong interpretation of the constitutional order, but the altercation further clarified the intent of the reform. It also confirmed the limited constitutional knowledge of the legislator, who was among the 60% of the lawmakers elected in 2024 for the first time to the legislature. 

The Legislative Yuan began reviewing the proposed amendments on April 15. The normal process of a discussion by the legislators, in a plenary session, of the amendments or of the new pieces of proposed legislation was suspended. The number of interventions by legislators and the speaking times were considerably reduced (and have remained so to this day). Abrupt and unjustified adjournments of committee meetings have been noted. And there appeared to have been a deliberate confusion organized around which versions of the texts were to be discussed in the documents provided to parliamentarians when they had to speak, a strategy seemingly intended to lose them in their own amendment requests, which were sent back to committee without review by the assembly. Last, the KMT speaker decided on a show of hands for the vote (as opposed to recorded vote by name), a practice that has been extremely rare in recent decades in the Taiwanese parliament.

On May 2nd, during a hearing of then-Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu, the same KMT legislator, Hsu Chiao-hsin, got into an argument with the Minister, who refused to reveal a sensitive piece of information. Confronted by her repeated insistence to reveal the name, Wu decided to end the fruitless exchange by telling her, disillusioned but sticking to his refusal to disclose the name: “Now, quickly go and sue me for regarding Parliament with contempt!” The expression “Contempt of Parliament” was used by the Minister himself, before the legislator had time to accuse him. The Blue-White alliance later drafted amendments to the Organic law of the Parliament and to the criminal code to create the “Crime of Contempt of Parliament”. 

The project did not originate in this exchange between the Minister and the Legislator. But here again, the incident, which was heavily discussed in the media, further disclosed or confirmed the direction of the amendments, which is an extension of legislative powers, including a new legal category that is difficult to define. In addition, the crime of “contempt of parliament” is understood concretely as “opposing a legislative hearing”, and this is simply an attitude (as opposed to defined actions) to be determined by the legislators, and thus subject to their subjectivity, emotions and political strategies.

In response to these maneuvers, on May 21 DPP legislators motioned four times to adjourn the session, each time rejected by the KMT and TPP, which used their majority to quickly move the  proposed amendments from the Judicial and Legislative Affairs Committee (chaired by the KMT) to the plenary session (where discussions were de facto suspended) and from the plenary session back to the committee. Eventually, the amended Organic Law on the Exercise of Powers and Functions of the Legislative Yuan and the amended Criminal Code were adopted in the third reading (the norm in Taiwan) on May 28.

A parliamentary coup?

Prior to the legislative back and forth in May, a delegation of sixteen KMT lawmakers traveled to China from April 26 to 28, seven weeks after the beginning of the first session of the newly reelected chamber. The legislators met with members of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee, including Song Tao, the director of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, as well as Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Bureau and president of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. 

According to Taiwanese media, Beijing hoped to use the meeting to prompt the Taiwanese legislative body to amend the “five national security laws” and the “anti-infiltration law,” which had been revised in 2019 by a DPP-majority parliament to strengthen national security against various types of Chinese influence operations in Taiwan, such as espionage, sending agents, and influencing public debate.

Meanwhile, in the LY, tensions had risen as minority DPP deputies found themselves legally incapacitated to contest the procedural abuses and diversions by KMT and TPP legislators. On the night of May 17, a violent physical confrontation broke out among lawmakers from the three parties, resulting in the hospitalization of several severely injured DPP and KMT legislators. DPP legislator Shen Bo-yang (Puma Shen), who was dragged on the floor during the session, suffered a brief concussion.

Was this a fast-tracked “reform?” A way by the KMT to reclaim some power that the ballots did not grant them and for the TPP to play an important role in the shaping of a new political balance? Or a  parliamentary coup? The event seems to qualify for the last option. The lack of prior legal and political debate on the advisability of such changes, the haste with which these new rules were adopted, in disrespect for the existing legal process, suggest a dimension of revenge against a DPP now firmly established in power. Or, even more dangerously, an attempt at a parliamentary coup forcing changes by abusing the rules, and granting the Parliament exorbitant new powers. 

The obvious misuse and distortion of this legal process, the remarkable acceleration of the pace of adoption of the amendments the drastic reduction of the time devoted to the discussion of the amendments, and the fact that the extension of the powers of the parliament had not been preceded by any debate on the current relations between the different powers under the Constitution, all these point to the recent developments being a parliamentary coup.

International media have apparently not perceived the gravity of it, hence our decision to write this paper, to provide a preliminary analysis of the event after the two authors conducted a field research in Taipei and around the Legislative Yuan from May 22 to May 28, 2024. Written in French on May 28-29, it was published on May 31 by AOC Media. The present article is a translated and updated English version of its first half. A second paper follows, which focuses on the social movements of protests organized around the Legislative Yuan between May 17 and May 28. The third and last part discusses the China factor in the event.

(Photo by Jenna Lynn Cody)