A Tsai is just a Tsai

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The election of an independence-leaning president would put Taiwan back in the international spotlight
Jan 9th 2016 | TAIPEI

UNDETERRED by the rain, the crowd leaps to its feet shouting “We’re going to win” in Taiwanese as their presidential candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, begins her stump speech. Some rattle piggy banks to show that their party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), relies on, and serves, the little guy—as opposed to the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), backed by businesses and fat cats and one of the world’s richest political institutions. Taiwan’s voters go to the polls on January 16th in what is likely to prove a momentous election both for the domestic politics on the island and for its relations with the Communist government in China that claims sovereignty over it. Eight years of uneasy truce across the Taiwan Strait are coming to an end.
Since taking office in 2008, the outgoing president, Ma Ying-jeou, has engineered the deepest rapprochement between Taiwan and China ever seen, signing an unprecedented 23 pacts with the mainland, including a partial free-trade agreement. It culminated in an unprecedented meeting in November between Mr Ma and Xi Jinping, China’s president, in Singapore. But if the rapprochement under Mr Ma was a test of whether closer ties would help China’s long-term goal of peaceful unification, it failed. For the past six months Ms Tsai, whose party leans towards formal independence for Taiwan, has been miles ahead in the polls, with the support of 40-45% of voters. The KMT’s Eric Chu has 20-25% and another candidate, James Soong, a former KMT heavyweight, about 15%. Taiwanese polls can be unreliable, and many voters are undecided. But if Mr Chu were to win, it would be a shock.


Taiwan elects its parliament, the Legislative Yuan, on the same day. That race is closer. But the DPP’s secretary-general, Joseph Wu, thinks his party can win it too, either outright or in coalition with two smaller parties—and the polls suggest he may be right. If so, it would be the first time any party other than the KMT has controlled the country’s legislature since the KMT fled to the island at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.
The election result will have regional consequences, but the campaign itself is being fought on livelihood issues. The economy appears to have grown by only 1% in 2015, less than in 2014. Taiwan is doing worse than other export-oriented Asian economies such as South Korea. Salaries are stagnant, youth unemployment is up and home ownership is beyond the reach of many. One study found that the capital, Taipei, has become one of the world’s costliest cities relative to income, with the ratio of median house prices to median household income rising from 8.9 in 2005 to 15.7 in 2014—nearly twice the level of London. Concerns like these have dented the KMT’s reputation for economic competence.
Self-inflicted wounds have not helped either. Most of the KMT’s bigwigs refused to run for president, fearing defeat. So its chairman, Eric Chu, put forward Hung Hsiu-chu, whose pro-China views proved so extreme that they nearly split the party. Mr Chu ditched her just months before the poll and ran for president himself. Ms Hung’s backers, many of them old-guard KMT voters, may abstain in protest. The party which for decades has dominated politics faces humiliation.
That would have profound implications for China. For years, the Chinese Communist Party’s policy towards Taiwan has been based on patience and economic integration. But the election campaign suggests that integration is a liability and that time may not be on China’s side. In 1992, according to the Election Studies Centre at National Chengchi University in Taipei, 18% of respondents identified themselves as Taiwanese only. A further 46% thought of themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese. Today 59% call themselves Taiwanese, while 34% identify as both—ie, very few consider themselves Chinese first and foremost.
Patience doesn’t pay
Among 20- to 29-year-olds, three-quarters think of themselves as Taiwanese. For them China is a foreign country, and the political ripples of this change are now being felt. In early 2014 students occupied parliament for three weeks in a protest against a proposed services deal with China. This proved to be a turning point: the KMT went on to be thrashed in municipal elections in late 2014. Some of the student leaders have formed their own party to contest the legislative election, joining 17 other groups and 556 candidates, who range from a heavy-metal front man to a former triad crime boss.
The last time Taiwan chose a DPP president, Chen Shui-bian, in 2000, cross-strait tensions escalated. Given China’s increasing assertiveness in the region under Mr Xi, things could be even more dangerous now. China has been piling pressure on Ms Tsai. Mr Xi says he wants a “final resolution” of differences over Taiwan, adding that this is not something to leave for the next generation. China is demanding that Ms Tsai approve the “1992 consensus”, a formula by which China and the KMT agreed there was only one China—but disagreed about what that meant in practice. Ms Tsai has long said no such consensus exists, though when asked about it in a presidential debate, she called it “one option”.
Ms Tsai is a very different figure from Mr Chen, who delighted in provoking China (and was later jailed for corruption). She is a low-key, English-educated lawyer schooled in international trade rather than in the rhetoric of Taiwanese nationalism. She has gone out of her way to assure China and America, Taiwan’s guarantor, that she backs the status quo and will be cautious. Many of her proposals, such as that Taiwan should expand its soft power through non-governmental organisations, seem designed to be uncontroversial. If her party takes control of the legislature, that would remove a source of instability: conflict with lawmakers made Mr Chen’s presidency even more unpredictable than it otherwise would have been.
Yet whatever Ms Tsai’s intentions, a lot could go wrong. Taiwanese politics is famously raucous, and the DPP’s radicals seeking formal independence might yet cause problems. Mr Xi, in turn, could come under pressure from military diehards arguing that China has been too patient. In one of the last foreign-policy vestiges of the “one China” idea, China and Taiwan have similar claims in the South China Sea, a nerve-racking part of the globe. If a new government in Taiwan starts tinkering with its stance on the sea, China might easily take offence. The election of an independence-leaning president comes at a dangerous moment.