Terry Gou (郭台銘), Taiwan’s wealthiest man and chairman of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, on Wednesday threw his hat into the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential primary.
There are many reasons that Gou’s bid should raise questions and red flags. Here are four:
First, Gou’s record as chairman of Hon Hai — known internationally as Foxconn Technology Group and famous for assembling Apple Inc iPhones — is questionable.
Hon Hai was one of the first Taiwanese firms in the 1980s to begin manufacturing in China to take advantage of its cheaper labor market. Over the years, there have been frequent media reports of poor working conditions at Foxconn’s Chinese facilities, including low pay, no sick leave for junior employees and forced overtime, with some assembly-line workers reportedly putting in 60-hour weeks and only being given one day off in 13.
From January to May 2010, 14 Foxconn workers at plants in Shenzhen committed suicide by jumping off roofs.
In 2012, CNN interviewed an 18-year-old Foxconn worker, identified only as Ms Chen to protect her identity.
“Foxconn employees have a saying: Use women as men and men as machines,” she said.
“It is so boring, I can’t bear it anymore. Every day I finish work and go to bed. I get up in the morning and I go to work. It is my daily routine. I almost feel like an animal,” Chen said.
The animal analogy is apt.
Gou once told senior managers at an end-of-year party: “Hon Hai has a workforce of more than 1 million worldwide and, as human beings are also animals, to manage 1 million animals gives me a headache.”
Gou also invited former Taipei Zoo director Chuang Hsuan-chih (莊絢智) to share his management experience with Foxconn managers, according to a report by the Chinese-language China Times.
At a time when Taiwan is seeking to diversify its economy away from China and tackle a chronic low-wage problem, his lukewarm commitment to Taiwan and the continued allegations of poor working conditions at Foxconn raise questions about how he would handle these issues.
Second, given that Gou’s business is inextricably wedded to China, many have questioned whether he would have Taiwan’s best interests at heart if he were president. Even supposing that Gou has undergone a Damascus road conversion and is now filled with patriotic fervor for his native land, given his core business interests in China, a perception of him as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) puppet are likely to dog him.
Third, Gou’s behavior at two high-profile forums in Taipei this week raises questions about his temperament. On Monday, at a forum to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the US’ Taiwan Relations Act, he asked American Institute in Taiwan Chairman James Moriarty whether the US would support a specific presidential candidate or would allow Taiwan to elect its own leader.
On Tuesday, Gou stormed out of the Indo-Pacific Security Dialogue after complaining that fellow panelists — a group of Taiwanese and US lawmakers — failed to answer a question he asked.
Fourth, on Wednesday, he said the sea goddess Matsu had appeared to him in a dream three days earlier and told him to “come out” — in what some cynics saw as an attempt to appropriate local religious beliefs to set himself up as a messiah figure.
KMT members and other voters should demand answers from Gou about these issues and incidents ahead of the KMT primary.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
RSS