As Taiwan chooses its next leader, will voters also have to decide between China, US?
Taiwanese voters will go to the polls on Jan 13 to elect a new president. But there is much more at stake. The programme Insight finds out how global power rivalry is playing out on the ground.
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TAIPEI: It is about 9 a.m. in Ruifang, the seaside district close to 40 kilometres north-east of Taipei, and fishermen have just returned from the sea.
Their catch: Ribbon fish, caught off the coast of Taiwan, in the East China Sea. These fish can grow more than 2 metres and are a popular dish in Chinese cuisine.
They are mainly sent to mainland China, says Huang Chih-ming, who heads the Ruifang District Fishermen’s Association. “The catch today is pretty good,” he observes. “Almost 500 kilogrammes.”
But there is a cloud of uncertainty over their future.
It was only last March when China lifted a ban on ribbon fish from Taiwan — a ban that coincided with the then United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei months earlier, affecting products from over 100 Taiwanese exporters.
“There are fishermen starting to say, … today (the Chinese) ban ribbon fish, tomorrow they might ban groupers or pencil squids or everything else,” says Huang. “Then (the fishermen) will really have no clue about the future.”
That is why he thinks the fishing community “might be more inclined” toward the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan’s Jan 13 presidential election, since the opposition party “communicates better with mainland China”.
“We don’t understand politics, but we want (to secure) our livelihood,” he adds.
For some voters, China’s assertiveness has helped them decide otherwise.
The ramp-up in China’s military flights around Taiwan, for example, has not gone unnoticed by aviation enthusiast Eric Chan. There were 380 incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone in 2020 and nearly 1,630 incursions last year.
“The more the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) oppresses Taiwanese, the more united the people of Taiwan become. This, in turn, becomes an encouragement to a certain political party,” says Chan, 54.
He is referring to the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has been in power since President Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016. The party, a strong proponent of Taiwan nationalism and autonomy, will be represented by William Lai Ching-te, 64.
Opposing him is Hou Yu-ih, 66, from the KMT, which last held power between 2008 and 2016 and is regarded as the more Beijing-friendly party.
The third option, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), founded in 2019, is headed by former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je, 64. For a while, the TPP had considered forming an alliance with the KMT, but the talks collapsed.
THEIR CAMPAIGN PLATFORMS
For their part, the candidates have made their respective party’s platform clear. Lai, who is Taiwan’s current vice-president, will continue Tsai’s “four commitments”, starting with a commitment to a “democratic constitutional order”, says the DPP’s international affairs director, Vincent Chao. The second commitment is to ensure that Taiwan and China “aren’t subordinate to each other”. The third commitment is to “resist encroachments on our sovereignty, or annexation”. “The fourth commitment is … that the future of the Republic of China will be decided by the 23 million people here on Taiwan,” says Chao, using the island’s formal name.
Source: CNA
