Taiwan opposition picks mayor with cautious Chinese stance for presidential race

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

Taiwan’s largest opposition party, the Kuomintang, has chosen the popular mayor of the country’s largest municipality as its candidate in January’s crucial presidential elections as tensions flare with China.

Hou Yu-ih, who runs New Taipei City, was selected on Wednesday ahead of Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn, the world’s largest iPhone assembler. Hou has taken a far more cautious stance toward Beijing than Gou, making him more palatable as the electronics mogul to an electorate whose overwhelming majority reject unification with China.

Hou said that although he opposes Taiwan independence, it also rejects China’s dominance under “one country, two systems”, the model applied to Hong Kong. Gou blamed Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party for rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait and called for negotiations with Beijing.

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and threatens to take it by force if Taipei resists unification indefinitely.

PLR Presidential candidate Lai Ching-te, the current vice president, has a wide lead, according to local pollster Formosa, although its latest survey released this month shows Lai’s lead over Hou is only 9 .4 percentage points against 13 percentage points on Gou.

Gou congratulated Hou on his appointment and called him “undoubtedly the best choice for the KMT”, allaying fears that the prominent entrepreneur could split the opposition vote by running a maverick campaign or siding on the side of Ko Wen-je, the former mayor of Taipei who leads a small opposition party.

Hou said to safeguard the Republic of China, the state that the KMT brought to Taiwan after the party’s defeat in 1949 in the Chinese Civil War, would be his unwavering commitment. “The ROC is our country,” he said. “Taiwan is our home.”

KMT Chairman Eric Chu said, “For the future of the ROC, for peace in the Taiwan Strait, the KMT must return to power!”

The KMT continues to identify as a Chinese nation, as opposed to a Taiwanese nation as the local DPP does, and is therefore Beijing’s preferred choice. But Taiwanese voters have alternated between the two political forces since the democratization of the 1990s, ignoring repeated Chinese attempts to impose a certain outcome through intimidation.

However, observers believe the war in Ukraine, along with China’s growing military might and Beijing’s growing willingness to use it to coerce Taiwan, could change that dynamic in future polls.

“The KMT will of course campaign in the direction [that] “A vote for the DPP is a vote for war, and a vote for the KMT is a vote for peace,” said a DPP politician who advises the Lai campaign. “It’s difficult for us because if the Chinese military continues to maneuver near Taiwan, our constituents will take the threat even more seriously, so we’re on the defensive this time.”

Hou, a former police chief, is thought to be more palatable to swing voters than Gou because he has shaped his profile by being pragmatic and has no known connection to China.