Taiwan opposition has shot itself — and the island — in the foot
- The KMT and TPP, by failing to field a joint ticket for the presidential poll, have effectively allowed the secessionist DPP to retain power
Christmas has come early for Taiwan’s DPP. The Democratic Progressive Party had an existential angst for a few weeks after the opposition parties threatened to run a joint ticket in the January presidential election.
But, as many of us had feared, the opposition leaders were just too petty and narrow-minded to get their act together. They couldn’t agree who would lead on the ticket, and so ended up registering for the election separately.
Repeated polls have shown Vice-President Lai Ching-te of the DPP as the leading candidate without a joint ticket from the opposition, though the latest poll indicates the gaps have closed significantly. But if Ko Wen-je of the upstart populist Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and Hou Yu-ih of the grandaddy Kuomintang (KMT) had joined hands, they had a good chance of winning.
A three-way race will favour Lai and his running mate Hsiao Bi-khim, a former de facto representative of Taiwan in the United States. Both are card-carrying advocates of independence for the island. If they win, we are looking at some interesting times ahead.
Opposition leaders have framed the coming poll as a choice between war and peace with mainland China, and yet they refused to compromise for the sake of the Chinese people. The speed with which both men found a running mate to register before the poll deadline – Ko with lawmaker Cynthia Wu Hsin-ying of the powerful family behind the Shin Kong Group, and Hou with pro-China media boss Jaw Shaw-kong – meant neither side took the joint ticket plan seriously enough beyond being an expedient way to win.
As it turned out, Foxconn tycoon Terry Gou did the honourable thing and bowed out, instead of stealing votes from the opposition and effectively handing the presidency to the DPP.
When describing Lai and his running mate Hsiao, the Western news media almost always phrases them as being portrayed as “separatists” by Beijing. But they themselves have characterised themselves as such. Lai has called himself a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence”. More recently, he said: “I would like to reiterate that Taiwan is already an independent and sovereign nation and thus we do not have a need to further declare Taiwan independence.”
When pressed further, he said he would work to maintain “the status quo”, which under the DPP and retiring President Tsai Ing-wen, has always meant salami-slicing their way towards the goal of de jure or formal independence. As a secessionist, Lai is nothing if not consistent in his not-so-hidden agenda; likewise Hsiao.
As a former envoy for the island in Washington with plenty of connections with both the Republican and Democratic parties, Hsiao will make the perfect conduit in Taipei for anti-China hawks from the US. Instead of moderating from Tsai’s constant cross-strait provocations, the pair may well worsen them.
Just as there are growing signs of a thaw or at least a temporary truce in the US-Chinese rivalry, a Taiwan administration under Lai and Hsiao will likely work against it by going into overdrive to encourage Washington’s “pivot to Asia”, as in containing the mainland in the Indo-Pacific and confrontation across the Taiwan Strait.
Hsiao herself has long been an influential foreign-policy maker and adviser within the DPP, dating as far back as when she was translating for disgraced president Chen Shui-bian. Her foreign policy credentials were what brought her to Washington after Tsai won her second term as president in 2020.
During that time, except for Tsai, Hsiao did more than anyone to encourage the most hawkish and anti-China elements within the Washington establishment to poke their noses into a region whose volatile and combustible elements most of them have little to no knowledge of. As an envoy for the island, she had been singularly effective, if not necessarily for regional or world peace.
There has never been a time when more US politicians think it’s OK to encourage the island to go independent and trigger a regional conflagration. With the pair in charge of the island, well, get ready for World War III.