Taiwan's politics: a constitution written for China and amended for Taiwan

What the mainland constitution still governs

The constitution in force was written for all of China. The National Assembly adopted it in Nanjing on 25 December 1946, the National Government promulgated it on 1 January 1947, and it took effect on 25 December 1947, before the government lost the mainland. It has a preamble and 175 articles in 14 chapters. Article 1 defines the Republic of China as a democratic republic founded on Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People, and Article 2 places sovereignty in the whole body of citizens.

For most of its first four decades the document did not govern much. Temporary Provisions added in April 1948 for the Period of Communist Rebellion overrode it: they widened the president's emergency powers and lifted the two-term limit in Article 47. Britannica records that, together with the emergency decree of 1949, they banned new parties and gave the military, police and intelligence services broad powers, while leaving local government and economic rights largely intact. The Foreign Ministry's handbook says the constitution began to serve as the foundation of democratic government only after martial law ended in 1987.

How the Additional Articles rewrote it for Taiwan

The National Assembly abolished the Temporary Provisions on 22 April 1991 and on the same day adopted the first Additional Articles. Rather than amend the main text, the reformers attached a separate set of articles that apply to what the constitution calls the free area of the Republic of China. Seven revisions followed, in 1991, 1992, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2000 and 2005; the Judicial Yuan voided the fifth in March 2000. Their combined effect was to make the president directly elected, reduce the Taiwan provincial government to an agency, halve the legislature, abolish the National Assembly, and require any further amendment or any change to the national territory to pass the Legislative Yuan by three-quarters and then win a referendum in which more than half of all eligible voters vote yes.

The Foreign Ministry's handbook draws the consequence: since 1991 the government has acknowledged that its jurisdiction extends only to the areas it controls, and the president and legislators are elected by, and answer to, the people of those areas. Article 11 of the Additional Articles still provides for laws governing relations between "the people of the Chinese mainland area" and those of the free area.

How the president and the legislature share power

The president and vice-president are elected together by direct popular vote for four years and may serve two terms. The president is head of state and commander of the armed forces, conducts foreign relations and appoints the premier, the president of the Executive Yuan, without the legislature's consent; that requirement was removed in 1997. The premier appoints the ministers, who form the cabinet and answer to the legislature. If the Legislative Yuan passes a vote of no confidence in the premier, the president may dissolve it within ten days. Neither the president nor the premier has a strong veto: the cabinet can send a bill back, but a majority of all legislators can uphold it.

What the five branches do

The two extra branches come from Sun Yat-sen's adaptation of imperial China's censorate and civil service examinations. Britannica's assessment is that the Control and Examination Yuans have lost most of their weight, and that for practical purposes Taiwan runs a three-branch system. The Control Yuan did not function at all from early 2005 to mid-2008 because the president and the legislature could not agree on its nominees.

How the legislature is elected

Since 2008 the Legislative Yuan has had 113 seats and a four-year term, after the 2005 amendments cut it from 225. Each voter casts two ballots. Seventy-three members are elected in single-seat districts, at least one in every county and city; six seats are reserved for Indigenous voters, three for the lowland peoples and three for the highland peoples; and thirty-four are filled from national party lists in proportion to the party vote, among parties that pass 5%. At least half of each party's elected list members must be women.

How the presidency has changed hands

Direct elections were twenty years in the making. Local elections came first, and Britannica describes democratisation as starting in local politics. The opposition that ran as independents under martial law formed the Democratic Progressive Party in 1986. The legislators elected on the mainland in 1947 and 1948 left office in 1991, and the whole legislature was elected on Taiwan for the first time in 1992. A Referendum Act was passed in 2003 and the first national referendum was held in 2004, alongside the presidential election.

The presidency has changed parties three times. The Kuomintang won the first direct election in 1996 with 54% of the vote, lost in 2000 to the Democratic Progressive Party, won again in 2008 with 58.48% and lost again in 2016, when the Democratic Progressive Party also took its first legislative majority with 68 of the 113 seats. In the election of January 2024 the Democratic Progressive Party won the presidency for a third consecutive term with about 40% of the vote, against 33.5% for the Kuomintang and 26.5% for the Taiwan People's Party; the same day no party won a majority in the legislature, which divided 52 seats to the Kuomintang, 51 to the Democratic Progressive Party, eight to the Taiwan People's Party and two to independents.

The parties are sorted less by left and right than by the question of China. The Kuomintang and its allies, the pan-blue camp, have supported the 1992 Consensus, under which the Kuomintang held that there is one China and that the two sides interpret it differently; the Democratic Progressive Party, at the centre of the pan-green camp, has rejected it since early 2019. Britannica notes that the Democratic Progressive Party has advocated formal independence and the Kuomintang opposed it, and that the plank has mattered less in practice because the United States and most other governments oppose a declaration and the People's Republic has said it would use force against one.

How the territory is governed below the centre

Below the central government are six special municipalities, 13 counties and three cities with county status, according to the Foreign Ministry's handbook of 2023 to 2024. The special municipalities, in order of population, are New Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung, Taipei, Taoyuan and Tainan, and they answer directly to the central government. Below the counties are 198 townships and county-administered cities, and the municipalities are divided into 170 districts, six of them Indigenous mountain districts. Since 2014 every local executive and council has been elected on the same day every four years.

Two layers inherited from the mainland constitution have been emptied. The Taiwan provincial government once had its own governor, elected directly for the first time in 1994, and its own assembly; the 1997 amendments suspended provincial elections and made it an agency of the Executive Yuan. Kinmen and Matsu, off the mainland coast, are administered as part of Fujian province.

Why the island's status is disputed

The record lists Taiwan as disputed, and this is the dispute. The Republic of China has governed Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu without interruption since 1949; the People's Republic of China has never governed them and claims them as part of China. The Republic of China has its own constitution, its own elected government, its own currency, its own armed forces and its own passport. The People's Republic holds China's seat at the United Nations and, by its own count in 2022, diplomatic relations with 181 states. This catalogue records each side's position as that side's, and takes no position of its own.

What the government in Taipei says

The Mainland Affairs Council stated on 2 June 2019 that the Republic of China is a sovereign state, that Taiwan has never been part of the People's Republic, and that its 23 million people have the right to choose their own future. The Foreign Ministry's handbook calls the Republic of China a sovereign and independent state with its own defence and foreign affairs. On 26 September 2026 the Foreign Ministry restated that neither the Republic of China nor the People's Republic is subordinate to the other, that the San Francisco Peace Treaty did not hand Taiwan to the People's Republic, and that only Taiwan's democratically elected government can represent it in the UN system. Britannica records that the government dropped its claim to govern the mainland in the early 1990s.

What the government in Beijing says

The People's Republic set out its position in a white paper of August 2022. It holds that China recovered Taiwan in law and in fact in 1945, that the People's Republic succeeded the Republic of China as the only legitimate government of the whole country on 1 October 1949, and that "Taiwan has never been a state". It cites the Anti-Secession Law of March 2005, which says the state will never allow Taiwan to secede, and says that the government will work for peaceful reunification but "will not renounce the use of force". The white paper counted 181 states with diplomatic relations with the People's Republic on the basis of its one-China principle.

What the General Assembly decided about China's seat

On 25 October 1971 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758, deciding "to restore all its rights to the People's Republic of China and to recognize the representatives of its Government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations, and to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek". The Republic of China withdrew. The two governments now read the text in opposite ways. A position paper of September 2025 from the People's Republic's mission to the UN says the resolution settled the representation of the whole of China, Taiwan included, once and for all. The Foreign Ministry in Taipei says the resolution runs to about 150 words, never mentions Taiwan, does not say Taiwan is part of China and gives the People's Republic no mandate to represent it.

Who recognises the Republic of China

As of 2 October 2026 the Foreign Ministry's list of diplomatic allies names twelve: the Marshall Islands, Palau and Tuvalu in the Pacific; Eswatini in Africa; the Holy See in Europe; and Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in Latin America and the Caribbean. Eleven of them are UN members. The People's Republic does not keep relations with any state that recognises the Republic of China.

Most other governments deal with Taipei through representative offices. The British government's travel advice states that the United Kingdom does not recognise Taiwan as a state and has no diplomatic relations with it. The United States ended diplomatic relations in 1979 and governs its ties by the Taiwan Relations Act of that year. Taiwan takes part in international bodies under other names: as Chinese Taipei in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum since 1991, and in the World Trade Organization since 1 January 2002 as the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu. It attended the World Health Assembly as an observer in 2009. The Foreign Ministry's handbook counts full membership of 45 intergovernmental organisations and their subsidiary bodies.

What residents tell pollsters

A poll by National Chengchi University in June 2023 found 62.8% of respondents identifying as Taiwanese, 2.5% as Chinese and 30.5% as both. On the status question, 32.1% chose the status quo indefinitely, 28.6% the status quo with a decision later, 21.4% the status quo moving towards independence and 5.8% the status quo moving towards unification.

How the state defends what it governs

The Republic of China Armed Forces descend from the National Revolutionary Army that Sun Yat-sen founded in 1924, and the 1947 constitution made them a national army in place of a party one. Their total strength was capped at 215,000 as of 2021. Britannica gives a defence budget of nearly US$17 billion for 2022, with US$8.6 billion more planned over five years. On 1 January 2022 the defence ministry set up an All-out Defense Mobilization Agency to organise the reserves.

Weapons come mainly from the United States, which has sold arms and provided training under the Taiwan Relations Act since 1979. The Legislative Yuan passed an Anti-Infiltration Act that took effect on 15 January 2020. Kinmen has been held since the Nationalist victory at Kuningtou on 25 October 1949, and came under an artillery bombardment that began on 23 August 1958 and lasted more than 40 days.