Taiwan faces a stark choice – embrace Chinese capital or remain a democracy

Reaction.life
Date: 9 January 2020
By: Eva Moody

“Is Taiwan possessed by evil spirits?” demanded the Kuomintang (KMT) party presidential candidate Han Guo-yu after a military helicopter crashed last week, killing eight military personnel on-board. The bombastic and confrontational Mayor of Kaohsiung is challenging the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) leader of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen for the presidency. Superstitions run deep on this self-governing island, yet Han’s blatant attempt to exploit a national crisis to attack Tsai for bringing Taiwan “bad luck” has been the latest in a series of distasteful gaffes that will likely cost him the election.

Taiwan goes to the polls this weekend in presidential and legislative elections that will determine the future not only of its 24 million inhabitants, but also play a decisive role in the rapidly deteriorating relations between the world’s two superpowers. While Beijing explicitly backs the KMT, Washington’s foreign policy establishment unofficially favours the DPP.

For the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang continues to be the founding historical narrative upon which the party’s political legitimacy is based. Chiang and his army in 1949 were forced to retreat to Taiwan, where the KMT ruled until the island elected its first DPP president in 2000. Beijing’s memory of Mao’s victory is tarnished by this loss of Taiwan. Every Chinese leader since Mao has supported the cause of re-unification with Taiwan, but none as vociferously as Xi Jinping. He has made re-unification a central goal for his presidency, intermittently dispatching warships to pass through the Taiwan Strait to demonstrate his intent.
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