Another big Asian election tomorrow, but this time not a predetermined result. Taiwan votes for both president and legislature, in a security environment that looks much more threatening than it did four years ago, when president Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won a second term of office in a landslide, taking 57.1% of the vote.
Tsai now retires due to term limits, and three candidates are bidding to replace her. The DPP has nominated current vice-president William Lai; its traditional rival, the Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), is running Hou Yu-ih, mayor of New Taipei; and Ko Wen-je, former mayor of Taipei, is the candidate of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), which he founded in 2019. A fourth candidate, tech billionaire Terry Gou, originally filed to run as an independent but withdrew in the face of poor polling.
The KMT and TPP tried hard to form a unity ticket to take on the incumbents, but it ultimately fell through: a potentially fatal problem in a first-past-the-post system. Ideologically, the DPP is centre-left while the KMT is centre-right and the TPP somewhere in between, but the more significant divide is their attitude to China. The DPP is historically the party of Taiwanese independence, while the KMT promotes itself as the voice of conciliation.
That doesn’t mean Hou would be willing to give up Taiwan’s actual (as distinct from theoretical) independence. Here’s how I put it four years ago:
In Hong Kong, it was fair to describe the losing establishment candidates as “pro-Beijing”: while not necessarily Communists themselves, they were advocates of co-operating with the Chinese government and acquiescing in its control of Hong Kong.
The KMT, however, is not “pro-Beijing” in the same way. The co-operation that it supports is economic rather than political; it aims for a good working relationship with Beijing without compromising Taiwan’s practical independence.
That remains true; the KMT continues to talk about “reunification”, but as a goal for the distant future to be pursued on Taiwan’s terms. And indeed its last administration, from 2008 to 2016, did a good job of advancing economic ties with China without giving up anything significant on the political front. What’s not clear, however, is whether that is still a viable strategy, or whether China under Xi Jinping is set on confrontation.
The opinion polls have consistently put Lai in the lead, but the margin has been narrowing. Hou, who a few months ago was running third, has now overtaken Ko and is only a few points behind Lai. It’s possible that as Ko’s supporters realise he cannot win they will desert to Hou in substantial numbers, which could be enough to deliver him victory.
On the other hand, it’s possible that Beijing’s typically clumsy efforts to influence the election will backfire, and the Taiwanese – particularly younger voters, for whom the claim to be “one country” with China is increasingly unreal – will decide that this is no time to be making concessions. Either way, the focus on democratic choice highlights the fundamental difference between the two countries, and why the defence of Taiwanese independence is so important.
President and legislature operate separately on the American model; seats in the unicameral legislature are a mixture of proportional and first-past the post, with six reserved for indigenous representatives. Last time the DPP and KMT were almost level on the party list vote, with 34.0% and 33.4% respectively, but the DPP cleaned up on the single-member seats, finishing with a total 61 out of 113. (The KMT won 38 and TPP five, with nine to smaller parties and independents.) If the opposition parties have learnt to co-operate a bit better they could whittle down that majority.
The World is Not Enough 
As you note, this election is not just about the domestic government of Taiwan, but about its status and its relationship with the communist regime on the mainland. The Chinese regime asserts that Taiwan is a province of China and maintains its right to seize the island by force. Officially, both major parties in Taiwan agree that Taiwan is a province of China but say that reunification can only come when China is a democracy. The claim that the government in Taiwan (which is still officially called the Republic of China) is legally the government of the whole of China has been quietly dropped, although never formally renounced.In practice, however (as everybody in Taiwan understands), the DPP represents those Taiwanese who reject reunification with China on any terms and want to see Taiwan become an independent country at some point in the future. The DPP does not openly espouse Taiwanese independence, but it does not need to. The KMT, once the party which promised to reclaim China from the communist bandits, has now become the pro-Beijing party.During the term of the last KMT President, Ma Ying-jeou (Ma Yingjiu) (2008-16), it seemed that an agreement was possible along the lines of the 1997 Hong Kong “one country, two systems” formula, entailing formal reunification while preserving Taiwan’s autonomy. Since then, however, the Taiwanese have seen the fate of Hong Kong under Xi Jinping’s neo-Stalinist regime, and this idea now has little support.A recent poll showed that 50% of Taiwanese support independence, while only 11% support reunification (the rest support maintaining the ambiguous status quo), With every passing year, the number of people who identify as Chinese declines – 70% now identify as Taiwanese.It should be remembered in this context that the status of Taiwan as part of China has always been very qualified. The indigenous population (now a small minority) are Austronesians, more closely related to Malaysians than to Chinese. Chinese settlement of the island began only in the 16th century and Chinese rule was established only in 1683. In 1895 China was forced to cede Taiwan to Japan, and 50 years of Japanese rule significantly changed the island’s culture. Chinese rule returned in 1945, in the face of considerable opposition, culminating in the “white terror” in 1947. In 1949 the KMT regime lost China to the communists. This means that Taiwan has been governed from the Chinese mainland for only four years (1945-49) in the last 129 years.
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