Lanhee J. Chen
For the US, Saturday’s Taiwan election results signal the continuation of heightened tension with China over the issue of Taiwan’s sovereignty. In some ways, President-Elect Lai Ching-te and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) made the election into a referendum over whether Taiwan should draw nearer to the US or China.
Lai’s victory signals four more years of efforts to emphasize the island’s ties to the US and to seek closer cooperation between Taipei and Washington. This will be the case regardless of who wins the US presidential election in November. Expect the US to continue its strong, bipartisan support for Taiwan – a posture reinforced by the presence of a bipartisan coalition of former senior officials who met with Lai and Vice-President-elect Hsiao Bi-khim in Taipei on Monday.
In fact, support for Taiwan is one of the few policy issues on which there is agreement between Republicans and Democrats. Further efforts to sell weapons and provide military support to Taiwan are likely to be a congressional priority, even during a contentious election year in the US. Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have evinced strong support for Taiwan, with Biden even declaring four separate times that the US would defend Taiwan if it were attacked by the People’s Republic of China or PRC (a position repeatedly walked back by members of Biden’s own administration). And policymakers in Congress have proposed legislation that would impose significant economic sanctions on China if it were to engage in efforts to take the island by force.
Overall, Taiwan’s voters chose continuity over change by delivering a victory to Lai and the incumbent DPP. The DPP’s victory means that it will be the first party to hold the presidency for three consecutive terms since Taiwan began directly electing its president in 1996. Lai’s results largely mirrored those found in the last public opinion surveys published almost two weeks ago, reflecting the reality that there were probably very few votes up for grabs in the stretch run leading up to Saturday’s election.
Taiwan’s voters largely overlooked concerns about a sluggish domestic economy in favor of the DPP’s skeptical view of China’s ruling Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping. But it was not a complete victory for President-Elect Lai. His administration will have to deal with a divided legislature where his own party did not come close to reaching a majority, allowing the two major opposition parties – the Nationalist or Kuomingtang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) – to come together to block his initiatives and generally make life for his administration more challenging. As is the case in many recent Taiwan presidential elections, voter turnout was almost 72% – slightly weaker than in 2020 and markedly lower than the high-water mark of approximately 80% in 2004 – but still a strong affirmation of the island’s system of democratic governance.
Taiwanese officials were able to announce election results within a few hours after the polls had closed and conducted an election generally free of accusations of fraud, foul play, or external influence (despite significant PRC efforts to influence the electoral result in the lead up to the balloting). China continues to view Taiwan as an existential issue over which there can be no negotiation. Shortly after Lai’s victory, in fact, Beijing’sTaiwan Affairs Office shrugged off the result, repeating its assertion that “Taiwan is China’s Taiwan” and that Lai’s election “cannot change the basic pattern and development of cross-strait relations.”
Xi and his underlings will likely use the four months between now and Lai’s inauguration on May 20 to make their displeasure known to residents of Taiwan through continued military incursions into the island’s waters and airspace, disinformation activities, and efforts to place economic pressure on the island. These actions are intended not just to impact people on Taiwan but to signal the PRC’s position to the US and the rest of the world. The PRC will also continue to diplomatically isolate Taiwan, something that continued this week when the small Micronesian country of Nauru announced it was switching formal relations from Taiwan to the mainland – for the second time. And it is these activities, coupled with America’s ongoing support for Taiwan, that will likely accentuate tensions between the US and China as Lai takes office, and beyond.
Lai is a particularly vexing problem for Xi and the Chinese Communist Party because he has long been disliked by Beijing, which has called him both a “troublemaker” and “separatist” who wants to push Taiwan toward formal independence; a claim that Lai himself denies, saying that there is “no need to declare independence” because Taiwan has already been operating for years as an “independent sovereign state.” Lai will pursue the status quo for Taiwan once he takes office and has expressed a willingness to engage in dialogue with the mainland so long as it happens on mutually agreeable terms – something that Beijing is unlikely to accede to. After all, voters on Taiwan reaffirmed his (and the DPP’s) views on cross-strait relations, and polling trends leading up to the election suggest that increasingly Taiwan voters view themselves as “Taiwanese,” an identity separate and apart from “Chinese” that makes “reunification” with the mainland even more challenging.
While some had hoped that Saturday’s elections would ease tensions across the Taiwan Strait and between the US and China, the reality is that the results affirmed the status quo. What Taiwan’s elections did demonstrate, once again, is the power of democracy there and that the people’s voice – even if it continues to support the uneasy balance between the island and mainland that has existed for decades – remains the loudest of all.
CNN
