‘He looks very old’: Stakes high in Taiwan election but candidates draw little enthusiasm from voters

When Hou Yu-ih, the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) candidate for Taiwan’s presidency, met the international press in Taipei on Thursday, he was keen to reassure them. Although he wanted more dialogue with Beijing, he said it would not come at the expense of Taipei’s relationship with the United States.

He ruled out any talks with Xi Jinping about reunification with mainland China and said that repairing the relationship should start with the private sector, including religious groups as well as businesses. And he claimed that the real risk to global stability came from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate, vice-president Lai Ching-te.

“If he is elected, what would happen? He advocates for Taiwan’s independence. This is something that will lead us to war,” he said.

Two days earlier, when Lai met many of the same reporters, he said that Beijing had always tried to interfere in Taiwan’s elections but this time was worse than ever. He said the mainland was making threats about war and peace as well as using fake news, economic coercion and inducements to tip the scales in favour of Hou and the KMT.

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“If China succeeds in intervening, and China designates the winner of the election, Taiwan’s democracy will be gone and Taiwan will not be electing a president, but will be choosing a provincial governor, the same as Hong Kong,” he said.

As Saturday’s election approaches, the contest to succeed Tsai Ing-wen as Taiwan’s president has become keener, the rallies louder and the campaigning more frantic. No polls have been published since January 2nd and parties are prohibited from talking about their private polling and nobody is predicting the winner with any confidence.

The wild card is the third candidate, former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je, who has won the support of younger voters but has been trailing Lai and Hou in the polls. Ko is not expected to win the election but his supporters could be crucial if they switch to one of the other candidates.

The stakes in the election are high, not only for Taiwan but for China, the United States and the rest of the world, and the outcome is unknowable. But talking to voters in Taipei this week, there was little enthusiasm for any of the candidates.

“In Taiwan, housing prices are ridiculous, even more expensive than London or any other famous city in the world. That is insane. We need to pay TWD20-30 million (€590,000-€880,000) just for a small home. These [kinds] of issues in our lives are very frustrating compared to our parents. I used to talk to my dad. He bought a house for TWD2-3 million (€59,000-€88,000) but 30 years later I need to pay 10 times more than him,” said Ke Arthas.

A 35-year-old lawyer who started his own firm three months ago, Ke was part of the 2014 Sunflower Movement that saw hundreds of students and activists occupy the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament, for two weeks. They were protesting against an attempt by the KMT government to force through parliament a trade deal with Beijing.

“Many of us chose DPP as our answer but now the DPP has been involved in some scandals involving sexual misconduct and corruption. And the DPP after eight years in power have become a bit arrogant, like the KMT used to be,” he said.

“So we’ve become a little bit frustrated because it looks like the revolution we were looking for 10 years ago didn’t come to us and the real path in front of us still has a lot of obstacles. So many young people feel frustrated and we need an answer for all of this.”

Ke was drawn to Ko for a while, admiring his rational approach to politics but he is unhappy with some of the candidate’s recent remarks, including his description of the Sunflower Movement as regrettable. And although Ke’s clients include KMT politicians, he is unimpressed by Hou, a 66-year-old former police officer who is currently mayor of New Taipei.

“He looks very old and I’m not sure an old guy like him has the same empathy for someone in their 30s like me. He looks boring and poker-faced,” he said.

Like most people his age, Ke views himself exclusively as Taiwanese and not as Chinese. Sixty-three per cent of Taiwan’s people now define themselves as Taiwanese only, up from 17 per cent in 1992.

Only 2.5 per cent describe themselves as exclusively Chinese, down from 25 per cent in 1992. And the proportion of people who say they are both Taiwanese and Chinese has fallen from 46 per cent in 1992 to 30 per cent today.

“Definitely Taiwanese, not Chinese. My parents speak Taiwanese but when I was a child they preferred me to speak Mandarin because speaking Mandarin might be more useful,” Ke said.

“My father, who influenced my political thinking, always considered himself Taiwanese although he was working as a police officer. But my mother thought she was Chinese and Taiwanese.”

The number of those identifying as exclusively Taiwanese began to rise sharply in 2008, something Chen Fang-yu, a political scientist at Taipei’s Soochow University, credits to the introduction of a new school curriculum 10 years earlier.

“Before that, everything is about China. I mean everything, our history, society, geography, everything is about China. And after that former president Lee Teng-hui changed the textbook. I was in the second year to use the textbook Understanding Taiwan and we became Taiwan-centric, not China-centric,” he said.

“For us, there’s no Chinese identity at all. We identify with Chinese culture, but we don’t think of ourselves as Chinese.”

The number identifying as exclusively Taiwanese dipped when the last KMT president Ma Ying-jeou was in office as relations with Beijing were calm. But it rose again sharply after the violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and the imposition of a National Security Law there the following year.

[ China’s Xi warns Taiwan over independence ahead of election ]

Identification as Taiwanese does not necessarily imply support for Taiwanese independence, which has been more volatile. And Chen says that Taiwanese nationalism has tended to be left-leaning because it is associated with the island’s democratisation following the end of martial law in the late 1980s.

“Taiwan’s case is kind of unique because in a very short time, the Taiwanese identity is rising and replacing the old one and the old one is an authoritarian legacy. Before democratisation, the official nationalism was Chinese nationalism and the KMT government did not allow people to have a Taiwanese identity. There was no freedom of the press or freedom of speech. So there was an official nationalism,” he said.

“In the 1990s, people who identify themselves as Taiwanese, it’s only about 20 per cent and right now for the younger generation, it’s about 90 per cent. And some people, I mean, some foreign scholars think that the rising nationalism maybe leans toward the right but it’s different because Taiwanese identity is connected with democratisation.”

Liu Wen, a writer and activist who teaches at Academica Sinica’s Institute of Ethnology in Taipei, notes a more recent shift in attitudes among those in their 20s. Comfortable with their Taiwanese identity, they are also more relaxed about China.

[ China threatens Taiwan with further trade sanctions as elections approach ]

“For us, the millennials, we’ve been through the Sunflower Movement, so we’re pretty sceptical about China and their economic benefits or whatnot, because we know there will be political terms that come with it. But I think for Gen Z, because they grew up in this democratic country and democratic environment, mostly DPP-led. They understand that China is a neighbouring country that has some kind of annexation plans for Taiwan, but they don’t see it as serious, I think, as we do,” she said.

“And they grew up with TikTok, a lot of Chinese drama. I do think there are some influences, not that they’re brainwashed at all. But they see the status quo is China is a country, we are a country, we’re two different countries, we interact. Why can’t we have a dialogue?”

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