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Foreign Policy (8 January 2020)

Taiwanese voters go to the polls on Saturday in the most contentious elections since Taiwan’s transition to democracy. Incumbent President Tsai Ing-wen has made the election into a referendum on Taiwan’s identity, painting her opponents as ready to hand the self-ruled island to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Victory for Tsai now seems certain. She is consistently polling at over 50 percent, while her primary challenger, the onetime rising star Han Kuo-yu, lingers at around 15 percent. In recent months, fortunes have changed for Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which suffered a serious defeat in 2018 local elections. Even in August, Tsai was barely ahead of Han, but support for her has risen as his polling numbers have crashed.

In large part, that’s because of China’s response to the democracy movement in Hong Kong. Tsai’s DPP is ardently anti-Beijing. The main opposition party, Kuomintang (KMT), is increasingly associated with pro-China policy—despite its origins on the mainland as the Chinese Communist Party’s foe. The mainland attitude toward Hong Kong has hurt the case for reconciliation between China and Taiwan: The DPP’s most recent advertisement plays to this, explicitly linking Taiwan’s cause with Hong Kong’s.

Economic concerns. Han has argued that Taiwan’s economic prospects will be threatened if it remains hostile to mainland China. Initially, that worked with voters, but Taiwan’s relatively prosperous economy and record-low unemployment have worked against the narrative. Han, meanwhile, faces accusations that he has been surreptitiously aided by the mainland from the start. Concerns over Chinese influence have been a major part of the election, with the DPP blaming the KMT for disinformation campaigns.

Failed policy. Tsai’s likely victory will deal another blow to the Chinese Communist Party’s long-term strategy of “one country, two systems”: the idea that Taiwan could nominally accept Beijing’s authority while retaining its own laws for a period, as with Hong Kong and Macao. Beijing’s soft sell has failed, but the mainland obsession with Taiwan’s so-called return to China won’t go away. Military options may even start to look more palatable.

Read more at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/08/taiwan-election-identity-tsai-ing-wen-china-disinformation/