Taiwan opposition picks mayor with cautious China stance for presidential race

Taiwan’s largest opposition party, the Kuomintang, has picked the popular mayor of the country’s largest municipality as its candidate for pivotal presidential elections in January as tensions flare with China.

Hou Yu-ih, who is running New Taipei City, was selected on Wednesday over Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn, the world’s biggest assembler of iPhones. Hou has taken a much more cautious stance towards Beijing than Gou, making him more palatable than the electronics tycoon to an electorate whose overwhelming majority rejects unification with China.

Hou has said that while he opposes Taiwan independence, he also rejects rule by China under “one country, two systems”, the model applied to Hong Kong. Gou has blamed Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive party for soaring tensions across the Taiwan Strait and called for negotiations with Beijing.

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and threatens to take it by force if Taipei resists unification indefinitely.

DPP presidential candidate Lai Ching-te, the current vice-president, has a wide lead, according to local pollster Formosa, though its latest survey published this month shows Lai’s lead over Hou would be only 9.4 percentage points compared with 13 percentage points over Gou.

Gou congratulated Hou on his nomination and called him “undoubtedly the best choice for the KMT”, allaying concerns that the prominent entrepreneur would split the opposition vote by running a maverick campaign or siding with Ko Wen-je, the former Taipei mayor who leads a smaller opposition party.

Hou said safeguarding the Republic of China, the state that the KMT brought to Taiwan after the party’s 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war, would be his unwavering commitment. “The ROC is our country,” he said. “Taiwan is our home.”

KMT chair Eric Chu said: “For the sake of the future of the ROC, for the sake of peace in the Taiwan Strait, the KMT must return to power!”

The KMT continues to identify with a Chinese nation, as opposed to a Taiwanese one like the homegrown DPP does, and is therefore Beijing’s preferred choice. But Taiwanese voters have been alternating between the two political forces ever since democratisation in the 1990s, ignoring repeated Chinese attempts at forcing a certain result through intimidation.

Recommended

However, observers believe that the war in Ukraine, as well as China’s growing military power and Beijing’s increasing willingness to use it to coerce Taiwan, could change that dynamic in the coming polls.

“The KMT is of course going to campaign along the lines [that] ‘a vote for the DPP is a vote for war, and a vote for the KMT is a vote for peace’,” said a DPP politician who advises the Lai campaign. “That is difficult for us because if the Chinese military continues to do manoeuvres close to Taiwan, our voters will take the threat even more seriously, so we are on the defensive this time.”

Hou, a former police chief, is believed to be more palatable to swing voters than Gou because he has shaped his profile around being pragmatic and has no known ties to China.