After Taiwan's election
English original of column published in Japanese on January 28 by the Mainichi newspaper
The presidential and parliamentary elections that Taiwan held on January 13th were in many respects the most significant that will be held in the Indo-Pacific this year. Certainly, the elections that will be held in Indonesia in February and in India in April will involve larger countries and many more voters than the one in tiny Taiwan, and plenty of international attention will be paid to Jakarta and New Delhi as the results come in. Nevertheless, we are likely to learn more from Taiwan’s election than we will from either of those giants.
The first significant thing about Taiwan’s elections is simply that they happen: this is the only Chinese-speaking country that has a democracy, and that democracy, which is now three decades old, is not just surviving but thriving. Taiwan proves that there is nothing incompatible between Chinese culture, society or history and the political system called democracy.
The second significant point was, of course, the result: that Taiwan for the first time elected a new president who is from the same political party as their predecessor, and it did so in defiance of threats and intimidation from the huge, powerful neighbour that is just 100 kilometres away across the Taiwan Strait.
After eight years of the Democratic People’s Party’s Tsai Ing-wen as president, the DPP’s Lai Ching-te, who for the past four years has been her vice-president, will be inaugurated as president in May. This is notable partly because normally the presidency has moved from one major party to another as part of the natural political cycle of optimism, disillusionment and then change. But mainly it is notable because an important feature of recent years has been tension between Communist China and Taiwan, with China sending more and more fighter planes to fly over Taiwanese territory as a tool of intimidation.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 naturally raised the question, for Taiwan as well as for other countries in the region, including Japan, of whether the next tragedy might be a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan. In his speech to the Chinese nation on December 31st, China’s President Xi Jinping said that unification with Taiwan will surely happen and that all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should “share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.
Consequently, it looked possible that Taiwanese voters who feared war might vote for a change, preferring a party that favours better relations with China. This did not happen: instead of switching to the Kuomintang, the oldest and most pro-China party, voters decided to stick with a DPP president.
But here’s the third significant point: during the election there was no party advocating unification with China, and all three parties advocated strengthening the island’s defences. And despite every effort at spreading disinformation through the internet and through Taiwanese media, to discredit the DPP government and to persuade voters to feel stronger sympathies towards mainland China, there was no sign that such persuasion had any impact.
As in all elections, economic and social issues were top of most voters’ concerns, especially in the parliamentary elections: wage-growth has been disappointing and housing costs have risen. For that reason, the DPP lost its majority of seats in the Legislative Yuan and will now have to negotiate for support from one of the other parties, probably the small and new Taiwan People’s Party. But as all three parties favour spending more money on defence, this should not pose a big problem for President Lai’s foreign or defence policies.
In its official response to the election result, China tried to exploit the TPP’s loss of its working majority by claiming that it does not represent the true views of the Taiwanese people. Yet on the matter of unification and of stronger defence against China, the election reflected opinion polls very accurately: opinion polls show that less than 2% of Taiwanese people are in favour of unification. More than three-quarters say they want to keep the status quo. More than 60% identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than either Chinese or both Chinese and Taiwanese.
Naturally we, as outsiders, as well as the Taiwanese, must wonder what will happen next, between China, Taiwan and of course the United States. There has been much speculation about whether China might greet President Lai’s victory by increasing its tactics of intimidation.
Yet the reality is that unless it were to attempt a real invasion or blockade, China does not have any good options. The government in Beijing has refused to hold talks with the Taiwanese government since 2016 as it considered President Tsai as being a separatist. Talks will presumably remain frozen under President Lai, but he is hardly going to care about that.
Moreover, economic pressure on Taiwan no longer works: although there are strong economic ties between the island and the mainland, Taiwan is a highly globalised economy which is not dependent on any one market. Now that China is experiencing slower growth, deflation and the impact of a declining population, the lure of riches in the vast Chinese market is far from irresistible.
The most likely scenario is that China will wait until after the American presidential election in November to decide what it should do. It will continue to try to harass Taiwan, just as it does the Japanese Senkaku islands and areas in the South China Sea that it disputes with the Philippines, but the real question facing President Xi is what attitude the president of the United States will take.
In 2021 and 2022 President Joe Biden broke with decades of American conventions by clearly declaring that in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan the US would intervene directly to defend Taiwan. Japan’s defence build-up plan, including its acquisition of US Tomahawk missiles and movement of military assets to the Nansei islands nearby to Taiwan, is helping to make a Chinese attack look less viable. So is the agreement by the Philippines to give America access to nine bases in its islands for logistics and potential use by US forces.
But the biggest question is whether whoever is elected to the White House in November decides to continue these policies, especially that commitment to come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of an invasion or blockade. The second most significant election for the future of the Indo-Pacific, after Taiwan’s on January 13th, will be America’s election on November 5th.