The Succession and the February Crisis

On the afternoon of January 13, 1988, Chiang Ching-kuo died at his Seven Seas residence in Taipei, aged seventy-eight. At 8:08 that evening, Vice President Lee Teng-hui was sworn in at the Presidential Office as the seventh president of the Republic of China under Article 49 of the Constitution. The ceremony took less than twenty minutes. On camera it was a smooth constitutional procedure. Off camera it raised a different question: a regime that had governed Taiwan for forty years had handed its highest office, for the first time, to a Taiwanese-born civilian with no faction of his own — while the party, the army and the security services all remained in other hands.

Real power sat not in the Presidential Office but at party headquarters. The chairmanship of the Kuomintang was vacant, the party was divided over whether Lee should serve as acting chairman, and Soong Mayling wrote urging delay. At the Central Standing Committee meeting of January 27, as Secretary-General Lee Huan worked through the agenda, Soong Chu-yu, then head of the party's cultural affairs department, rose to demand an immediate vote — remembered afterwards as "the final kick at the goalmouth." Lee Teng-hui became acting chairman, and at the Thirteenth Party Congress that July he was formally elected chairman. The first gate had opened. It was only the first.

Over the next two years the Kuomintang split into a "mainstream" and a "non-mainstream" faction. The first gathered around Lee and argued for localization and faster reform; the second centered on Premier Lee Huan, Chief of the General Staff Hau Pei-tsun and a group of party elders, held that power should return to collective leadership, and questioned both Lee's constitutional legitimacy and his national loyalties. By 1989 Lee Huan held the Executive Yuan and Hau held the army. What Lee Teng-hui held was the office itself and an approval rating that rose every year — in a system with no direct election, an asset not yet convertible into anything.

The confrontation came in February 1990. An extraordinary plenary session of the Kuomintang broke down over how to nominate the candidate for the eighth presidential term: the mainstream faction wanted a standing vote, which would secure the Lee Teng-hui–Lee Yuan-zu ticket; the non-mainstream faction demanded a secret ballot. When the standing vote carried, the non-mainstream faction turned instead to the National Assembly, gathering signatures for a rival ticket of Judicial Yuan President Lin Yang-kang and Chiang Wei-kuo — a pairing that was itself a statement. The contest, later called the February Crisis, was settled when a group of eight party elders was convened to mediate and persuaded both men to withdraw.

The decisive variable came from outside the system. The First National Assembly was meeting at Chungshan Hall on Yangmingshan — delegates elected in mainland China in 1947 and 1948 and never re-elected since — and while electing a president they were also moving to extend their own terms and enlarge their own powers. On March 16 a handful of National Taiwan University students sat down on the plaza of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall; within days there were thousands. On March 21 the National Assembly elected Lee Teng-hui the eighth president with 641 votes. That same afternoon he received more than fifty student representatives at the Presidential Office and promised a National Affairs Conference and a timetable for reform.

After his inauguration on May 20, Lee nominated Hau Pei-tsun to form a cabinet. The decision brought protests against "military interference in politics" into the streets, and inside the party it completed an exchange: the central figure of the non-mainstream faction was moved out of the army and into an office answerable to a legislature that was itself about to be entirely re-elected. In the same inaugural address, Lee announced that the Period of Mobilization would be terminated within a year.

In the twenty-eight months between January 1988 and May 1990 there was no coup and no soldier in the street; power changed hands inside an authoritarian party without breaking it. That is the precondition on which every later institutional reform rests. The significance of the February Crisis is not who won it, but that it was the last time the presidency was settled in a party's back rooms. Six years later the same office would be decided by twenty-one million voters.