At the beginning of the year, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) looked at risk of becoming the nation’s first one-term president. Then came the unrest in Hong Kong.
Tsai had clawed back some ground in opinion polls before protesters started taking to the streets of Hong Kong in the hundreds of thousands in June.
However, the mass demonstrations there against China’s deepening encroachment have given her a noticeable boost ahead of the presidential elections in January next year.
Photo: Chiang Ying-ying, AP
As Taiwanese watch with concern the events in Hong Kong, particularly crackdowns on demonstrators, with scenes of police beating protesters huddled in balls on the floors of Hong Kong’s subways, Tsai’s firm stance on China has become her biggest selling point.
What happens in Hong Kong, including the way Beijing responds to protracted unrest, matters for democratically run Taiwan.
Taiwan’s leaders have often faced challenges in dealing with China. There are risks at home from being seen as either too hard or too soft and indeed, it was her China policy that tripped Tsai up in the second half of last year.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
Tsai’s refusal to endorse Beijing’s bottom line that both sides belong to “one China” — the so-called “1992 consensus” — while at the same time avoiding overt moves to assert Taiwan’s independence upset people on both sides of the spectrum.
The upshot was a sense she had mismanaged the China issue.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) Jan. 2 speech, in which he urged in-depth “democratic consultations to work toward China’s long-held goal of unification” and explicitly reaffirmed “one country, two systems” as his preferred model, followed by the protests in Hong Kong, have rallied support behind Tsai taking a stronger stance.
She has said Taiwan would never unite with China as long as she is in power.
In the last presidential election in 2016, Jamie Chiang voted for a candidate who promised a closer relationship with China.
Come January, she will back Tsai.
“I am terrified Taiwan may become like Hong Kong if we accept the ‘92 consensus,’” the Taipei electronics company worker said. “I am worried we may lose our democracy, freedom and everything we are used to because you can’t trust China.”
Tsai’s popularity sank as low as 15 percent after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) fared poorly in the nine-in-one elections in November last year.
Part of her falling approval was due to cuts in civil servant, teacher and military pensions, plus wage stagnation.
Tsai stepped down as DPP chairperson and there was chatter she could be dumped as its candidate for the election.
Before the pro-democracy protests erupted in Hong Kong, Tsai still lagged behind Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, by double digits in most opinion polls.
Now, she leads Han by 8 percentage points, according to a survey late last month by broadcaster TVBS.
Much of her support is from those under 40.
With an increasingly assertive Chinese leadership under Xi — and a trade dispute threatening to split the world into competing spheres of Chinese and US influence — the presidential election is shaping up to be Taiwan’s most consequential since its first direct presidential election in 1996.
Hong Kong was returned to Chinese rule in 1997 under an agreement with the UK that guaranteed the territory a “high degree of autonomy” until 2047.
Beijing always saw the use of the model in Hong Kong as a test case for Taiwan.
Tsai has been vocal on the turmoil in Hong Kong, speaking at least once a week via Facebook and Twitter in support of the demonstrators. She was the first leader to express concern over the arrests of prominent Hong Kong opposition figures.
In a Facebook post last month, she vowed Taiwan would never become like Hong Kong as long as she is president.
Last week, one of Hong Kong’s most well-known pro-democracy activists, Joshua Wong (黃之鋒), visited Taiwan and met with the DPP Chairman Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰).
China has pointed to the DPP as one of the key agitators behind the protests.
On Wednesday, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office urged the DPP to withdraw its “black hand” from Hong Kong and to stop sheltering “radicals.”
Chiang said she has mostly voted for KMT candidates in previous presidential elections, eager to maintain a harmonious cross-strait relationship since her father works in China and her sister-in-law is from China’s Zhejiang Province.
That changed with Hong Kong’s forceful response to the protests and what she sees as China’s willingness to violate international agreements.
“I don’t believe anything they say about ‘one country, two systems,’” she said.
Concern in Taiwan over China’s response to the Hong Kong protest movement is showing up in its ubiquitous bubble tea shops.
Several Taiwanese chains with Chinese branches bowed to online pressure and voiced support for the view that Hong Kong and Taiwan are both part of China.
Back in Taiwan, there have been counter campaigns to buy tea only from outlets that support the demonstrations.
China has used its economic leverage at times of political tension with a number of neighbors, and Taiwan is no exception.
Since Tsai came to power, Beijing has curbed the number of Chinese tour groups allowed to visit Taiwan and banned individual tourist travel entirely.
About 40 percent of Taiwan’s exports go to China, and about 400,000 Taiwanese work there.
While the protests have given Tsai a boost, other factors have also helped, especially among younger voters, such as Taiwan’s economic resilience in the face of the US-China trade dispute and a landmark decision to legalize same-sex marriage in May.
A Mainland Affairs Council poll at the end of July showed the number of Taiwanese who support formal independence, either immediately or at a later date, rose to 26 percent — more than double those who want unification.
It also showed that almost 90 percent of respondents opposed “one country, two systems” and about 65 percent supported the protests in Hong Kong.
The hand of China has played out ahead of previous elections. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army conducted missile tests in the Taiwan Strait in 1996 in an unsuccessful effort to scare voters against voting for then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝).
Shortly before the 2016 poll, Chinese Internet users pressured a 16-year-old Taiwanese member of a South Korean pop band into recording a video apologizing for appearing on a South Korean TV show holding Taiwan’s flag.
Tsai’s victory is by no means assured, as two other high-profile figures continue to hint at presidential runs. Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co founder Terry Gou (郭台銘) have until Tuesday next week to decide whether to run.
Gou appears closest to joining the race, having sent aides to the Central Election Commission to discuss the application procedures for formally registering his intention to run.
Han favors closer exchanges with China, but has been quiet about specific cross-strait policies since he won the KMT nomination. He plans to give a detailed account of his stance by the end of this month, political adviser Chao Chien-min (趙建民) said.
Chao said that Han disagrees with “one country, two systems.”
Han has previously described Taiwan and China as two partners in an “arranged marriage” who had fallen “madly in love,” and said peace talks between the two were inevitable.
He became the first elected official from Taiwan to visit Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong — the Chinese Communist Party’s outpost — during a trip there in March.
For Tsai, much may depend on how the Hong Kong protests play out.
“Even though Hong Kong’s protest has a decisive effect among the young generation in Taiwan in helping them form their political preferences for the first time, its effect among the older generation depends on how much the protest and the trade war influence China’s economy,” said Austin Wang (王宏恩), an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada.
“It’s too early to say who will win in the end,” Wang said.
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