Tomorrow is Election Day in Taiwan, where the selection of a new president will shape the island’s relationship with China — and, by extension, shape international affairs.
Today’s newsletter offers a guide. We know that many readers have paid little if any attention to the campaign, but it’s been fascinating and has implications for the competition over global influence between the U.S. and China.
Background
The fate of Taiwan is one of the big unknowns of the 2020s. It is now a thriving democracy of around 23 million people, with average annual income higher than in parts of Europe. Many other countries, including the U.S., treat it almost as an independent nation without formally recognizing it as such. These countries instead maintain the diplomatic fiction that there is “one China,” including both mainland China and Taiwan.
Xi Jinping, China’s president, wants to reunify the two and absorb Taiwan in coming years, U.S. officials believe. Xi’s increasing bellicosity has raised fears that China will start a war. Official U.S. policy — known as strategic ambiguity — is to remain vague about how it would respond if China invaded. But President Biden has said publicly that the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s aid.
When foreign policy experts worry about how a world war might start, they often put Taiwan at the top of the list. (Our colleague Edward Wong told the back story on an episode of “The Daily” last year.)
The candidates
Tomorrow’s presidential election includes three candidates, one of whom — Lai Ching-te, the favorite and the current vice president — China would clearly like to see lose. Lai’s party, the Democratic Progressive Party, has historically favored independence. (Here’s a new Times story on the party.)
During the campaign, Chinese officials have called Lai a “destroyer of peace” and have spread disinformation about him, as Nicholas Kristof of Times Opinion has written. This propaganda sometimes suggests Lai is an American puppet. China has also imposed new trade sanctions on Taiwan and has said Lai’s election could cause a recession, The Economist noted.
Most of these Chinese claims are dubious. Lai doesn’t represent a break with current Taiwanese policy, given that his party has run the island for the past eight years. If anything, he has campaigned on a relatively moderate message, trying to appeal both to voters who favor full independence and to those who prefer the current situation. Yesterday, he said he would “maintain the status quo” to “protect the country’s survival and development.”
Lai remains the favorite to win. He has led in almost every poll. But the race has recently narrowed and appears close.
Both of the other candidates are more friendly toward China, and polls suggest voters may be coalescing around one of the two — Hou Yu-ih, a mayor and former police chief, who’s in the Kuomintang. (For history buffs: Yes, there is an irony in the Kuomintang’s friendliness to China, given that it was the political party that ruled China before losing a civil war to the Communists in the 1940s and fleeing to Taiwan.)
Hou has also argued that Lai’s election would risk war with China. Hou, by contrast, has promised both to bolster Taiwan’s military and to build closer ties with Beijing.
The third candidate is Ko Wen-je, a former surgeon who won the Taipei mayor’s race in 2014 despite having no prior political experience. Ko, in 2019, founded the Taiwan People’s Party, which has tried to channel disaffection with the two main parties. He has portrayed himself as an effective technocrat.
The issues
One striking part of the campaign is that it has often revolved around kitchen-table issues rather than Taiwan’s relationship with China.
“China remains a major theme, but not as much as four years ago,” said our colleague Amy Chang Chien, who’s covering the campaign from Taiwan. “The main themes of the election this year are more about bread-and-butter issues, like high housing prices and slow income increases.”
Younger voters seem especially disillusioned, as Amy has written. Many are now undecided, and they could swing the election. (The same happens to be true in the U.S. this year.) Taiwan will also be choosing members of its legislature tomorrow, and experts say that divided government is a plausible outcome.
The economic concerns are a weakness for Lai, because he is the sitting vice president. His biggest advantage, on the other hand, may be China’s recent actions. It has become more threatening toward Taiwan, including by sending airplanes, balloons and a satellite near the island. China also continues to crack down on Hong Kong, an area Beijing once promised to grant partial autonomy.
For any Taiwanese wondering whether there is any middle ground between remaining separate from China and becoming entirely controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, Hong Kong’s experience suggests that the answer is no.
More on the election
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“Frozen garlic!”: Get a glimpse of Taiwan’s loud, proud version of democracy.
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A counterintuitive take: Jason Willick, a Washington Post columnist, argues that a Kuomintang upset would reduce tensions with China and give Taiwan and the U.S. more time to build military defenses that could prevent an invasion.
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