On January 11, 2020 the Taiwanese people showed the Communist regime on the mainland what they thought of their reunification plan based on the Hong Kong idea of “one country, two systems”. Some 74.9% of the voters went to the polls. They re-elected President Tsai Ing-wen with 57.1%. The candidate of the ruling, center-left DDP is critical of Communist China which, in return, totally ignored her. The unconventional Kuomintang candidate Daniel Han Kuo-yu ended up with only 38.8% of the vote.
The Hong Kong anti-extradition protests had further opened the eyes of more Taiwanese voters who can no longer have any illusions regarding the “one country, two systems” approach the dictatorial, one-party regime on the mainland has in mind. Especially the younger voters in Taiwan have no desire to end up in a dictorship. Their island had evolved from a KMT dictatorship to a thriving democracy. The majority does not want to reverse gear.
In 2016, the Tsainami had already swept Taiwan. However, not so long ago, President Tsai Ing-wen had looked weak. In the November 2018 local and municipal elections, after 20 years on the opposition benches, the KMT candidate Daniel Han Kuo-yu managed to win the country’s second largest city, Kaohsiung. Overall, the KMT was the big winner and DDP the big loser in the 2018 election. But the protests in Hong Kong saved President Tsai Ing-wen because the focus of the election moved from domestic issues to cross-straits relations.
As in the Hong Kong local election of November 2019, in the 2020 Taiwanese presidential election, the majority of the people concerned clearly rejected the perspective of their country being dominated in the future by Communist China.
Taiwan is highly dependent on the cross-straits trade. Over 40% of the country’s exports are with China, including Hong Kong. The cross-straits supply chains are important. The economies of the two countries are intertwined. The Communist regime also depends on know-how and direct investments from Taiwan, but with its 1.4 billion people market, it is in a much stronger position than the small, 24 million people island.
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The reelected Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. Official photograph 2016. Office of the President of the ROC. Wikimedia Commons. [photo updated on January 16, 2020].
Article added on January 13, 2020 at 15:45 German time.
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