Taiwan’s KMT is at a crossroads. In the coming months, and as China exerts immense pressure on Taiwan, the party will have to make a choice between becoming a more viable participant in Taiwan’s democratic experiment (certainly the preferred option) or wrecking ball.

J. Michael Cole is a Taipei-based senior fellow with the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington, D.C., the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, Canada, and the Taiwan Studies Programme at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is a former analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Ottawa. His latest book, Insidious Power: How China Undermines Global Democracy (co-edited with Dr. Hsu Szu-chien), was published in July this year. 

Image: Reuters