Unlikely political comeback in Asia
China’s actions may deliver 2nd term to Taiwan’s president
TAIPEI, Taiwan — This time last year, the political future of Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, was in ruins.
She had resigned as chairwoman of her party after it suffered a humiliating defeat in regional elections. Party elders urged her not to seek reelection. The premier she appointed quit to challenge her in the party’s primary last summer.
Now, with the Saturday election nearing, Tsai has made a comeback that seemed impossible only a few months ago. She mostly has China to thank.
China’s undisguised belligerence toward Taiwan has given Tsai’s campaign a new vigor. So have the protests in Hong Kong over China’s steady encroachment on that territory’s autonomy.
Tsai and her supporters regularly cite the tumult in Hong Kong as evidence of why Taiwan, an island democracy that has been functionally independent since 1949, cannot simply surrender to China’s demands to unite.
“We know the responsibility we bear,” Tsai, 63, said at a rally in New Taipei City, where she pledged to a stadium full of cheering, flag-waving supporters to preserve Taiwan as “a beacon of democracy” in the face of efforts by China to undercut it.
“Taiwan is on the front line,” she said.
For Beijing, a second four-year term for Tsai would amount to a repudiation of the pressure tactics that it has wielded against Taiwan ever since she took power in 2016. As a policy failure, it would echo the overwhelming victory scored by the democratic opposition in Hong Kong’s district elections in November.
The vision of a China Dream extolled by the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, it seems, has little appeal to people when they are given the chance to vote on it.
A former deputy director of the office overseeing Taiwan affairs publicly acknowledged the failure at a policy forum in December, saying that China needed to rethink “our own working methods and approach.”
Instead of enticing people in Taiwan to draw closer, Xi’s policies have pushed them further away, and a recognition of that reality is already raising unusually public concerns in Beijing. An annual government survey in Taiwan found that barely 1% of Taiwanese favored unification “as soon as possible.”
Since Tsai took office in
May 2016, China has largely refused to engage with her government. Instead, Beijing has issued threats against Tsai’s aims to “split” China, and flexed its military muscle. It has also restricted economic and cultural ties, including the flow of tourists — all in the hopes of undermining her political support.
At the same time, it offered incentives to Taiwanese businesses and support for her political opponents, including the Kuomintang. China’s tactics have involved what officials and analysts have described as covert efforts to spread disinformation and otherwise undercut Tsai’s administration.
Those efforts spilled into the public after a man claiming to be a disillusioned operative for Chinese military intelligence detailed for the Australian authorities an extraordinary — if still largely unverified — litany of secret operations aimed at advancing China’s interests in Taiwan, as well as Hong Kong.
Those operations, he claimed, included providing support for Tsai’s opponent, Han Kuo-yu. Aformer legislator with a populist agenda, Han was elected mayor of Kaohsiung, the southern port city, the same race in which Tsai’s party was routed.
Han, 62, has denied receiving support from China, even suggesting that the accusations of Chinese skulduggery were part of a plot by Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party. The public furor, though, has put Han — with his comparatively conciliatory views toward China — on the defensive.
As mayor and now as a presidential candidate, Han has called for a greater effort to smooth relations with China. In March, only months after being elected, he crossed the Taiwan Strait to visit four Chinese cities.
Han claimed the goal of his visit was to drum up sales for Kaohsiung farmers and fishermen, and Chinese state media touted an agreement for $30 million in new trade. He also met officials from the Communist government who oversee relations with Hong Kong and Macao under the formula called “one country, two systems.”
When t he protests erupted in Hong Kong three months later, Han was forced to declare that he would never accept such an arrangement for Taiwan. Now, in his stump speeches on the campaign trail, he barely mentions China at all, reflecting how toxic the issue has become for voters across the political spectrum.
Han has focused his attacks instead on Tsai’s handling of the economy and other bread-and-butter issues that are often on voters’ minds as much as China. “Only I can make Taiwan strong,” Han said at one rally, standing in front of a sign that reflected his populist message: “Safety for Taiwan, money for the people.”
Tsai and her surrogates never miss a chance to tar him for his association with China.
When the two squared off for the first time at a sort of televised debate Dec. 18, Han railed at her for losing Taiwan’s dwindling diplomatic allies, most recently two tiny Pacific nations. The world, he said, had forgotten about Taiwan during her tenure.
She retorted: “Just now Han said the world has forgotten Taiwan. That’s probably because he’s going to China a bit too much.”
Last January, Xi set the tone in a speech declaring that unification between China and Taiwan was “the great trend in history” and promising a similar “one country, two systems” model for Chinese rule over the island.
Tsai’s latest campaign video warned that Xi’s formula had failed Hong Kong, especially its youth.
“Only a few hundred kilometers away, countless young people are being arrested, being locked up, being mistreated, being disappeared,” the narrator says, then adds. “From the beginning, ‘one country, two systems’ has been a dictatorship.”
Hong Kong was “a wakeup call” that validated Tsai’s efforts to forge deeper economic and political ties beyond China, said Lai IChung, an adviser to Tsai’s party and president of the Prospect Foundation, a think tank in Taipei.
“What’s happening to these youngsters is resonating with the youth in Taiwan,” he said of the protest movement, which has received support from Taiwanese activists and church leaders, if not the government. “This is not something abstract.”