Taiwan's relationship with China is arguably one of the most emotional, complex and dangerous flashpoints in the world. Due to their exclusion of domestic dimensions, prominent international relation theories have difficulty explaining current cross-strait paradoxes including economic interdependence and political hostility. This dissertation is an effort to integrate domestic and international politics into a four-level nested games model to facilitate analysis of cross-strait disputes regarding Taiwan's international status and national identities. Instead of using traditional triangular analysis that assumes all three actors as unitary, this study focuses on unveiling recent domestic politics and battlefields in Taipei and Beijing only, relegating U.S. domestic concerns to a secondary position. Expanding on concepts pioneered by Putnam, Tsebelis and Bueno de Mesquita, this model shows how four major levels of analysis---International, Cross-Strait, Individual and Groups---interact horizontally and vertically. Taiwan's presidential election of 2004 and China's Anti-Secession Law of 2005 are two perfect examples of how apparently "suboptimal" decisions in the eyes of observers are proven to be optimal when nested games involving decision makers are considered. Using a loophole in the new Referendum Law, Taiwan's incumbent candidate engineered two controversial anti-China referenda to be nested in the 2004 presidential election game, and won the election. Alarmed by a mounting separatist movement, China's top legislature unanimously enacted the Anti-Secession Law modeled on the U.S. civil war experience. The two institutions---Taiwan's Referendum Law and China's anti-secession legislation---have highlighted Taiwan's dilemma under the DPP government. Facing two clear choices between the independence dead-end and China's market, two antagonistic political camps emerge in Taiwan, fighting for state identities and national policy orientation, plunging the island into a "democratic civil war" and leaving it more distant from democratic consolidation. Using insights from nested games theory, this model suggests how 20 percent of the Taiwanese population could initiate a devastating war despite internal division, by nesting an independence referendum in a general election. This study demonstrates the supremacy of domestic concerns over the international game, concluding that current cross-strait conflict is rooted less in the autocracy-democracy dichotomy than in the China-Taiwan identity clash.
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机译：台湾与中国的关系可以说是世界上最激动，最复杂和最危险的危机之一。由于排除了国内因素，著名的国际关系理论很难解释当前的两岸悖论，包括经济上的相互依存和政治敌对。本文旨在将国内外政治纳入四层嵌套的博弈模型中，以利于对两岸关于台湾国际地位和民族身份的争端进行分析。这项研究没有使用将所有三个角色都统一起来的传统三角分析，而是着眼于仅揭示台北和北京最近的国内政治和战场，从而将美国国内关注的问题放到了次要位置。该模型扩展了Putnam，Tsebelis和Bueno de Mesquita率先提出的概念，显示了四个主要分析层次（国际，两岸，个人和群体）如何在水平和垂直方向上进行交互。 2004年台湾总统大选和2005年中国的《反分裂国家法》是两个完美的例子，证明了当考虑到涉及决策者的嵌套游戏时，观察者看来“次优”决策显然是最佳的。台湾现任总统利用新公投法中的漏洞，设计了两个有争议的反华公投，将其嵌套在2004年总统大选中，并赢得了选举。受到日益分裂的运动的震惊，中国最高立法机构一致制定了以美国内战经验为蓝本的《反分裂国家法》。台湾的公投法和中国的反分裂国家立法这两个机构，都凸显了台湾在民进党执政期间的两难境地。面对独立的死胡同和中国市场之间的两个明确选择，台湾出现了两个对立的政治阵营，为国家身份和国家政策取向而战，使台湾陷入“民主内战”，与民主巩固的距离越来越远。该模型利用嵌套博弈论的见解，提出了通过内部独立公投在大选中实现百分之二十的台湾人如何尽管内部分裂而发动毁灭性战争的方法。这项研究表明了国内对国际博弈的关注，认为目前的两岸冲突根源于专制民主二分法，而不是中台身份冲突。
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