Elections in Taiwan: Beijing has made clear its preference that next president should be anyone other than Lai

As passengers emerge from Jiangzicui subway station in New Taipei City they come face to face with a giant electronic billboard showing a campaign video for Lin Guochun. A former police officer who has been a local councillor for 30 years, Lin is hoping to win a seat in Taiwan’s parliament, the legislative yuan, for the opposition Kuomintang (KMT).

“If you are in trouble, just call my mobile number and I’ll listen to you myself,” he tells voters.

The location of Lin’s election office carries a message of its own because it was here in 2014 that Cheng Chieh, a 21-year-old university student, killed four people and injured 24 in a random stabbing spree on a subway train. Cheng was executed two years later and support for the death penalty is one of the policies that distinguishes the KMT from President Tsai Ing-wen’s governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Inside Lin’s headquarters, volunteers pushed leaflets into envelopes while the candidate outlined the issues that were most on voters’ minds. At the top of the list were the failure of wages to keep pace with prices, overcrowded and underfunded schools and above all, traffic.

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“The roads are very crowded but it’s not easy to control. We say people should use the subway or the bus but most people like to drive their cars. But there are so many cars in New Taipei City because it has a population of four million, so it’s a very crowded area,” he said.

The KMT’s Hou Yu-ih favours closer ties to Beijing, arguing that Tsai’s policies have seen tensions ratcheting upwards and risk provoking a military attack from the mainland

If domestic concerns are the focus for parliamentary candidates, the campaign to succeed Tsai as Taiwan’s president has been dominated by the issue of the island’s relationship with mainland China. The DPP’s candidate, vice-president Lai Ching-te has promised to maintain Tsai’s policy of increasing defence spending and moving closer to the United States.

The KMT’s Hou Yu-ih favours closer ties to Beijing, arguing that Tsai’s policies have seen tensions ratcheting upwards and risk provoking a military attack from the mainland. A third candidate, the Taiwan People’s Party’s (TPP) Ko Wen-je, is appealing to younger voters with a call to stop arguing about Taiwan’s constitutional future but he also favours more dialogue with Beijing.

Lin has known Hou, who is also a former police officer, for more than 40 years and he predicts that he will transform the relationship with Beijing if he becomes president.

“He has many, many good friends in Beijing and in mainland China. You know why? Because as police officers we have a lot of co-operation with China, Hong Kong and Macau,” he said.

“Under the DPP during the past eight years, we almost lost communication. We don’t communicate with each other. But if Mr Hou wins the election, it will change a lot. He will open Taiwan up for Chinese people to come for a visit. At the moment, it’s difficult for them to come here and almost nobody except business people can come to Taiwan.”

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

Beijing has made clear its preference that the next president should be anyone other than Lai, whom it views as a dangerous advocate of Taiwanese independence. In 2022 and 2023, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted large-scale military exercises around Taiwan, demonstrating how it might blockade the island and firing missiles over its territory.

A military conflict could be devastating for Taiwan but its impact on the rest of the world would also be immense, with the risk that it could draw the US into a war with China. Bloomberg Economics this week estimated the cost of such a war as around $10 trillion, about 10 per cent of global GDP and much greater than the impact of Covid 19, the war in Ukraine and the 2008 financial crisis.

If Beijing were to take control of Taiwan, it could limit Washington’s freedom to operate in the western Pacific and diminish its capacity to defend allies in the region

Separated from mainland China by the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan lies between the East China Sea and the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes. It produces most of the world’s semiconductors, essential for everything from mobile phones to electric vehicles, and almost all of the most advanced ones.

Taiwan is at the centre of the first island chain, a Cold War term used by the US to refer to a string of islands and archipelagos stretching from Japan down to the Philippines. If Beijing were to take control of Taiwan, it could limit Washington’s freedom to operate in the western Pacific and diminish its capacity to defend allies in the region.

Taiwan was part of China for centuries until 1895 when the Qing emperor ceded it to Japan under one of the unequal treaties that marked Beijing’s “century of humiliation”. Japan occupied the island until 1945, when it became part of the Republic of China under its nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.

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

When Chiang lost China’s civil war to Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949, he fled to Taiwan with his supporters, establishing a military dictatorship there and continuing to claim that his was the legitimate government of all of China. Mao asserted that his People’s Republic of China (PRC) included all of the national territory including Taiwan, a claim that has been renewed by all his successors in Beijing.

Washington backed Taiwan’s claim until 1979 when it established diplomatic relations with Beijing and agreed to cut diplomatic ties with Taipei. Other countries including Ireland followed suit, Taiwan was driven out of the United Nations and the island now enjoys diplomatic relations with only 15 countries.

In 1992, Beijing and Taipei reached an informal consensus under which both sides agreed that there was one China but they disagreed about what that meant. Although the terms of the consensus are disputed, it has allowed Beijing to accept Taiwan’s self-governing status as long as the island does not declare formal independence.

Xi Jinping has ramped up the rhetoric on Taiwan since he took office in 2012, declaring that resolving its future could not be left to the next generation. Like his predecessors, he says he wants to reunify with Taiwan by consent but will not rule out the use of force if Taipei declares independence.

Since Tsai came to power eight years ago, she has doubled Taiwan’s defence budget and deepened military co-operation with Washington. Dialogue with Beijing has effectively broken down and there have been disputes over everything from trade to allegations of interference in Taiwan’s elections.

Although the KMT is the party of Chiang’s anti-communist nationalists, it has traditionally been the most friendly towards China, even if Hou insists that he does not favour unification with the mainland and rejects Beijing’s formula for Taiwan of “one country, two systems”.

“The left-right spectrum doesn’t apply in Taiwan’s politics. The spectrum is from independence to unification,” said Hsiao Yi-ching, a political scientist at the National Chengchi University’s Election Study Centre.

Public polling is banned during the final two weeks of the campaign and even discussing poll results during the purdah period can lead to substantial fines. But the last published polls suggested that the DPP’s Lai was ahead with the KMT’s Hou in second place and the TPP’s Ko in third.

“The TPP is the youngest party and it lacks basic organisation at a local level but the KMT has a strong local organisation, it is the oldest party and it has strong support. So the KMT hope that Ko Wen-je’s supporters will do strategic voting,” Hsiao said.

“Ko Wen-je hates the DPP the most, and some of the TPP’s supporters may want to switch their vote to the KMT because they don’t want the DPP to win this election. So the most important thing is how many people who support the TPP will switch their votes to the KMT.”

When Tsai was re-elected in 2020 it was in the wake of Beijing’s imposition of a national security law in Hong Kong following the violent suppression by police of pro-democracy protests. But the Taiwan National Security Survey (TNSS), published every two years, has shown a significant shift in public opinion since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and the US sent weapons to Kyiv but no troops.

“Most people, maybe more than 60 per cent of people, think that if Taiwan declares independence, China will attack Taiwan. And more than 60 per cent of people think that if China attacks Taiwan, the US will not send troops. So many people may support Taiwanese independence but they worry that war could happen,” Hsiao said.

“In 2020 most people didn’t believe that war would happen but now they believe that war will happen. This is the critical difference. The attitude in Taiwan has changed so much. Maybe in 2020 people worried that Taiwan would become like Hong Kong and so we need to be tough with China but they didn’t think that war would happen and if it did, they thought the US would help Taiwan, even send troops to Taiwan. But then the Ukraine war happened.”

At the DPP’s campaign headquarters this week, election workers were sorting merchandise branded in the party’s colour green with the slogan Team Taiwan 2024. Most of the staff and volunteers were young, and the LGBTQIA rainbow flag was on every other desk.

The party’s head of international affairs, Vincent Chao, is a former diplomat who headed the political division of Taipei’s representative office in Washington. He rejects the KMT’s charge that the DPP has heightened the risk of war by provoking Beijing and says that Lai has no intention of declaring Taiwan an independent state.

“This is simply not an option that’s being considered. We are already in an independent country. There is simply no need,” he said.

Taiwan was a military dictatorship until the late 1980s but it is now one of the most progressive liberal democracies in Asia. In 2019 it became the first Asian country to legislate for same-sex marriage

He said that Taiwan recognised that, although it depended on the support of the US, the primary responsibility for defending the island lay with its own people. And he draws a different lesson from the war in Ukraine than that reflected in the shift in Taiwanese public opinion over the past two years.

“It’s that deterrence and preparation are key, and that we never want to give any authoritarian power any delusions that war is a viable option, or that it would be helpful for achieving their political objectives over Taiwan. I mean, that’s at the heart of everything we do, which is how do you build sufficient deterrence so that war is unthinkable,” he said.

Taiwan was a military dictatorship until the late 1980s but it is now one of the most progressive liberal democracies in Asia. In 2019 it became the first Asian country to legislate for same-sex marriage and the DPP has been at the forefront of promoting the liberal agenda.

Chao acknowledges that the party’s profile, progressive on social and economic issues but in favour of high defence spending and closer links to the US, is unusual. But he believes it makes sense in the context of Taiwan’s position and its uncertain status.

“Every country has different politics and a different spectrum of politics and what’s traditionally seen as left and right in some countries may not be completely cookie-cutter applicable in other countries. A stronger relationship with the US, stronger defence, this is all connected to this idea of defending Taiwan’s sovereignty. And defending Taiwan sovereignty is at the heart of what we’ve been able to accomplish in terms of our progressive politics,” he said.

“Without sovereignty, we wouldn’t be able to make progress on LGBT rights, on building a further diverse society, on protection of our indigenous cultures. Being able to make independent decisions is at the heart of us as a country and without that we’re not going to see any of the progress we’ve made.”

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