The End of Mobilization and the Remaking of Parliament
On June 21, 1990, the Council of Grand Justices issued Interpretation No. 261: senior members of the central representative bodies who had never stood for re-election must cease exercising their functions by December 31, 1991. The language was constitutional; the operation was political. It set a fixed end date for a parliament elected in mainland China in 1947 and 1948 and continued in Taiwan for more than forty years. Three months earlier those same delegates had moved, at Chungshan Hall on Yangmingshan, to extend their own terms — which is what set off the Wild Lily movement.
Then came the National Affairs Conference. From June 28 to July 4, 1990, a hundred and fifty figures from across the political spectrum met at the Grand Hotel: the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party, academics and returnees from abroad, including several only recently struck from the blacklist. The conference had no legal force, but it produced the list that governed the next several years of reform — terminate the Period of Mobilization, abolish the Temporary Provisions, re-elect the entire parliament, elect provincial and municipal executives, and change how the president is chosen. From then on Taiwan's constitutional overhaul had an agenda everyone had seen.
On April 22, 1991, the Second Extraordinary Session of the First National Assembly passed ten Additional Articles to the Constitution and voted to abolish the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion. On April 30 Lee Teng-hui declared the Period of Mobilization terminated as of midnight on May 1. The weight of that date is easy to understate. The Temporary Provisions had been in force since 1948; they froze the main text of the Constitution and gave the president unrestricted emergency powers and unlimited terms. They were the legal skeleton of the martial-law state. Lifting martial law removed the decree. 1991 removed the skeleton.
Termination also carried an external meaning. It amounted to a unilateral declaration that the civil war was over: Taipe…
Termination also carried an external meaning. It amounted to a unilateral declaration that the civil war was over: Taipei would no longer treat the government across the strait as a "rebel group," nor claim to exercise authority over all of China. The Straits Exchange Foundation was established at the end of 1990 and began operating in March 1991, and two years later the Koo–Wang talks were held in Singapore. Beijing was not grateful, reading the move instead as groundwork for "two Chinas."
On December 31, 1991, the senior members of the central representative bodies retired en masse. A parliament elected on the mainland, which had sat in Taipei for forty-three years, came to an end. Ten days earlier, elections for the Second National Assembly had given the Kuomintang about 71 percent of the vote and the DPP about 24 percent; the DPP had adopted its independence clause at its congress that October, and the result was widely read as public reserve toward the harder position. In May 1992 a second round of amendment shortened the presidential term to four years and wrote direct election of provincial and municipal executives into the constitution.
The real watershed was December 19, 1992: the entire Legislative Yuan, 161 seats, was contested at once. The Kuomintang took about 53 percent of the vote and just over ninety seats; the DPP passed fifty for the first time. It was the first parliament in Taiwan's history chosen entirely by voters in Taiwan. Three months later, under days of interpellation and the threat of a no-confidence motion from that new legislature, Premier Hau Pei-tsun resigned and was replaced by Lien Chan. The argument over military men in politics ended, in the end, on the floor of the Legislative Yuan.
Lifting martial law let people into the street; terminating the Period of Mobilization gave the people in the street somewhere to go. The three years from 1990 to 1992 left no photograph to set beside the Wild Lily or Kaohsiung. What they left was a set of constitutional amendments, one complete general election, and a parliament that would have to face voters at regular intervals ever after. The part of Taiwan's democratization that cannot be reversed was finished here.
They had been elected across the provinces and cities of China in 1947 and 1948, for terms of three or six years. After the government moved to Taiwan, re-election was in practice impossible, and so they stayed — an arrangement first justified as necessary to preserve constitutional continuity, and forty years later the target of abuse at every election. Most were well past eighty, helped into the chamber by children or carers. As they saw it they were not clinging to office; history had lodged them in a position with no exit. Once they all retired, the claim to represent the whole of China would go with them. In March 1990 they moved at Chungshan Hall to extend their own terms and enlarge their powers, and that was the last straw for public opinion; three months later the Grand Justices supplied a fixed date. On December 31, 1991, the last of the first-term members processed their retirements under a statute that granted generous settlements — which drew criticism of its own. What ended that day was not only a set of offices but a parliament that had sat in Taipei for forty-three years while its electorate lay across the strait. They are the least pitied group in this democratization, and also the only one required to complete the reform by leaving.
Isle of Time