As live-fire military drills were being conducted off the coast of Taichung a few weeks ago, a presidential spokesperson said in a statement that Taiwan would not bow to Chinese pressure. The move came after a tense start to the year for the nation.
In the nine-in-one elections on Nov. 24 last year, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) suffered heavy defeats, losing control of seven municipalities out of 13 that it held.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which had been in a state of crisis since the DPP’s landslide victory in the 2016 elections, rose from the ashes to secure the mayorship or commissionership in 15 out of 22 cities and counties.
Following the results’ release, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) announced that she would resign as party chairperson. To her surprise, Premier William Lai (賴清德) and Presidential Office Secretary-General Chen Chu (陳菊) tendered their resignations, although Chen later backed away from her decision.
Having lost the public’s support, as well the confidence of her own party, Tsai’s suitability as a candidate in next year’s presidential election has fallen into doubt. But what of China’s role in all of this?
Since his ascendency to office in 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has taken a far more aggressive approach toward Taiwan than any of his recent predecessors. On multiple occasions, Xi has warned that the political division across the Taiwan Strait cannot be passed down the generations and confirmed China’s willingness to use force to achieve unification should peaceful means fail.
While an unofficial diplomatic truce existed between Taiwan and China under former Chinese president Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) government, with the arrival of Xi and his administration came a resumption of attempts to poach Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, beginning with the Gambia in November 2013.
This occurred under a KMT-led government in Taiwan, well before the DPP was voted into power in 2016 and despite then-president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) efforts to push the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement — which would have promoted further economic integration between Taiwan and China — through the Legislative Yuan.
Of course, it was Ma who made history by being the first president to meet with the head of Chinese since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
Yet, from Beijing’s perspective, this carrot-and-stick approach failed to produce the desired results when in 2016 the KMT lost the elections in favor of a DPP government with Tsai at the helm.
After this, Chinese pressure on Taiwan increased significantly. Channels to enable cross-strait dialogue were severed and attempts to reduce Taiwan’s international participation intensified. As a result, under Tsai’s administration, Taiwan has lost more diplomatic allies, its membership applications to the World Health Assembly, Interpol and the International Civil Aviation Organization have been routinely blocked, and international companies have been forced to refer to Taiwan as a province of China.
In addition, China has become more emboldened in its use of military exercises to deter what it terms “Taiwan separatists.”
Over the course of the past year or so, Chinese fighter jets and bombers have conducted multiple circumnavigations of Taiwan; the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy completed the largest naval parade in China’s history and held live-fire drills in the Taiwan Strait for the first time since just before the 2016 election; and the 60,000-tonne Liaoning, China’s sole operational aircraft carrier, made “routine patrols” past the coast of Taiwan on three separate occasions.
Aside from these forms of indirect pressure, China has also been accused of seeking to directly influence the outcome of last year’s local elections through an online campaign of spreading disinformation and propaganda.
Although by no means the first time that China has been suspected of meddling in domestic Taiwanese politics — for instance, there is evidence of Chinese interference in the protests against Tsai’s pension reforms — the scale and level of sophistication is unprecedented.
At the heart of this operation is the “50 Cent Army” (五毛網軍) — a collection of Internet commenters and hackers tasked with manipulating public opinion for the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They are the foot soldiers of China’s cyberwarfare machine, working all hours writing comments on social media platforms and posting fake news articles.
It is likely that the 50 Cent Army had a hand in the unfortunate affair that led to the death of Su Chii-cherng (蘇啟誠), director-general of the Osaka branch of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Japan. In the midst of a particularly ferocious typhoon, a series of blog posts, which were later traced to an IP address in Beijing, claimed to be Taiwanese citizens stranded at Kansai International Airport.
They said that China was forced to come to their aid after Taiwanese officials had failed to organize their evacuation. Occurring only a couple of months before the election, the story led to a public outcry in Taiwan before it was finally debunked, but not in time to prevent Su from taking his own life.
There is even growing suspicion that the 50 Cent Army was involved in Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu’s (韓國瑜) meteoric rise to fame, which culminated in him winning the Kaohsiung election, the first KMT candidate to do so in 20 years. Before he achieved what was one of the greatest upsets of the election, Han was a relatively unknown figure who, until his failed run for the party chairmanship in 2017, had remained on the sidelines of the KMT.
Given Kaohsiung’s reputation as a traditional DPP stronghold, his nomination as the party’s mayoral candidate was also viewed as a dead-end job with little prospect of success. Yet, according to Google trend analysis, in the build-up to the election, Han’s name received more mentions over a one-month period than Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) — the star of the 2016 elections and a public favorite going into the last year’s poll — with a significant amount of interest emanating from China.
Another potential source of Chinese interference is the suspected funding of pro-China candidates by individuals and organizations with ties to China. The Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau has been investigating 33 individual cases of suspected Chinese funding based on evidence that leads back to the Chinese government.
While most of the funds are believed to have been funneled through Taiwanese businesspeople with investments in China, there is also the possibility that organized crime groups close to the CCP might have offered additional financial support, particularly for the purposes of vote-buying.
However, despite their best efforts, did Chinese attempts to steer the course of the election really affect the final results?
The temptation to read cross-strait politics into every facet of Taiwanese political activity, foreign or domestic, is unfortunately commonplace.
However, this denies Taiwan any agency beyond its relationship with China. In this election more than in previous ones, the Taiwanese public demonstrated that the most immediate issue on their minds is not always cross-strait relations.
Although China is a common gripe among the Taiwanese electorate, it was instead the economy that proved to be the main cause for concern. For more than a generation, lackluster growth has been the norm and it has taken its toll on Taiwan’s working class.
Although the economy is now growing at a rate of about 2.4 percent, the benefits of this have yet to be fully felt by ordinary workers, who endured wage stagnation from 2000 to 2016.
On top of this, Tsai’s pension reforms, while necessary to prevent the imminent bankruptcy of the entire state pension system, have hit hardest those who rely on them the most.
While there are those who would point to China as the primary cause behind Taiwan’s economic woes, this often fails to capture the true extent of the picture.
For instance, with regard to the lack of real wage growth until 2016, economist and Vice Premier Shih Jun-ji (施俊吉) has highlighted the effect of globalization in equalizing workers’ wages, the overexpansion of Taiwan’s institutions of higher education and the method used to calculate real earnings — no mention is made of China.
During one of the worst periods for cross-strait relations in many years, Tsai has restored economic growth and even announced a tax revenue surplus as a result of the economy’s strong performance over the past two years. China’s plan to foment discontent surrounding Tsai’s pension reforms also failed after a poll released last year showed that 64.2 percent of respondents expressed support for the new pension schemes.
Although it is true that since multiparty democracy emerged in the mid-1990s, local political parties have tended to split according to their stance on cross-strait relations, in last year’s local elections, there was the first real sign that Taiwanese politics is moving away from this system.
In its place, an increasingly personalist form of politics has taken root, led by figures like Han, who, having been shunned by his own party, was forced to exist on the fringes of partisan life, or Ko, who chose to reject traditional partisan divides altogether and campaign as an independent.
Rather than define themselves within the narrow spectrum offered by cross-strait politics, these new politicians are tailoring their policies to the immediate concerns of the public.
What emerges is a highly populist style of politics built largely on domestic issues, such as the economy, jobs and welfare. This, combined with the growing strength of labor unions, heralds a day when partisan divides might be split along conservative versus liberal lines, rather than Taiwan’s relationship with China.
If anything, Beijing’s insistence on tying local politics back to China will only produce more resistance and further alienate those politicians who attempt to maintain the facade.
Jack Broome is a security analyst specializing in conflict and peacebuilding with a focus on East and Southeast Asia.
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