Taiwan’s Government Has a Messaging Crisis on China

Taiwan’s local elections on Nov. 26 produced a shock for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as it experienced its worst performance ever and ended up with control of only five of Taiwan’s 22 counties and cities. The defeat was even more damning considering that President Tsai Ing-wen had highlighted China as a threat and urged the public to vote for the DPP to send the world a message. It was a line that helped Tsai win two presidential elections in a row—but the problem with making every election a referendum on Beijing is that eventually the public gets numbed, especially when the party itself doesn’t seem to be taking defense as seriously as it should.

Some have argued that the DPP’s defeat was a repudiation of its China stance, while others have pointed out that local elections mainly cover domestic issues. There is truth in both arguments, but what is clear is that the results exposed serious problems with Tsai and the DPP. Tsai has been eager to confront China but has avoided taking on the domestic costs of actually hardening Taiwan’s defenses. This contradiction has come back to bite her.

The main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) already held most of the cities and counties from the previous elections in 2018, but the DPP certainly did not expect to get blanked in the economically and demographically vital north, losing all of its existing city mayoralties there, as well as the central and east.

Taiwan’s local elections on Nov. 26 produced a shock for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as it experienced its worst performance ever and ended up with control of only five of Taiwan’s 22 counties and cities. The defeat was even more damning considering that President Tsai Ing-wen had highlighted China as a threat and urged the public to vote for the DPP to send the world a message. It was a line that helped Tsai win two presidential elections in a row—but the problem with making every election a referendum on Beijing is that eventually the public gets numbed, especially when the party itself doesn’t seem to be taking defense as seriously as it should.

Some have argued that the DPP’s defeat was a repudiation of its China stance, while others have pointed out that local elections mainly cover domestic issues. There is truth in both arguments, but what is clear is that the results exposed serious problems with Tsai and the DPP. Tsai has been eager to confront China but has avoided taking on the domestic costs of actually hardening Taiwan’s defenses. This contradiction has come back to bite her.

The main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) already held most of the cities and counties from the previous elections in 2018, but the DPP certainly did not expect to get blanked in the economically and demographically vital north, losing all of its existing city mayoralties there, as well as the central and east.

In an attempt to galvanize voters, Tsai gave a speech at a large rally just two days before the election, highlighting the threat of China and urging the public to vote for her party to “stand up for Taiwan.” Hundreds of DPP candidates also signed a pledge to “resist China” and “never surrender.” But in the end, the KMT won big.

Tsai’s “protect Taiwan, resist China” position was successful in the past, but it clearly failed this time. Surveys show, however, that Taiwanese are still deeply worried about China and have overwhelmingly negative feelings about Beijing. It was apathy that drove the results, not a sudden love or lack of concern about the mainland. And that widespread public apathy, even resignation, about national defense stems from the DPP government’s huge discrepancy .

Since coming to power in 2016, Tsai has refused to agree to the 1992 Consensus, which China’s government sees as a necessary condition for any talks. As a result, there have been no official high-level interactions between the two sides in the past seven years.During this time, China has continued to issue warnings to Taiwan against seeking “independence” while increasing its military buildup and activity. Tsai has responded by striking a defiant tone and speaking out against China, as have her cabinet officials. Taiwan has also increased military orders from the United States, while welcoming visits from U.S., Japanese, and European politicians.

However, Taiwan’s government has been reluctant to inform the public about the seriousness of tensions such as the possibility of war and the preparation and sacrifices that people would need to make. They talk about China as an enemy, but they don’t talk about the possibility of war and the sacrifices the public would need to make. Until very recently, the government had also failed to make preparations such as carrying out civilian defense training or extending the four-month conscription.

The government has been unable to resolve long-standing problems in the military with logistics, training, and manpower such as shortages in pilot retention and troop recruitment. A big part of this is an expectation that the United States would intervene quickly to help Taiwan in case of war with China. But that has caused much of the Taiwanese public to view a fight with China either as an inevitable defeat or a U.S.-carried victory—not as something they can get involved in themselves.

To some degree Ukraine changed that, with some Taiwanese voluntarily signing up for defense classes. However, the government has been slow to act. Although it extended reservist training from one week to two earlier in 2022, it was only as a trial for 15,000 reservists, meaning the majority of reservists last year, more than 95,000, still underwent one week of training. In 2023, the two-week training will be applied to 22,000 reservists, but not to the other 97,000 reservists who will still do one week.

The government also announced on Dec. 27, 2022, that it would extend conscription for young males from the current four months, which has been widely derided as useless, to one year. However, this will only start in 2024 and only for men who were born in 2005 and after, meaning that all men over 19 who do their conscription in 2024 will still do just four months. The government had been talking about this since at least March of last year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, but the authorities dragged their feet in making the announcement by waiting to do it at the “end of the year,” presumably to avoid upsetting voters before the Nov. 26 local elections.

During China’s unprecedented drills in August 2022 after former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit, China fired several ballistic missiles that flew over Taiwan, but this was not revealed to the public by Taiwan’s government. In fact, this was only known after Japan’s defense ministry made a public announcement since some of those missiles landed in Japanese waters.

And as those drills in August forced dozens of flights to be diverted or canceled and disrupted Taiwanese fishing vessels’ transit, many people in Taiwan appeared blissfully indifferent, which some even portrayed as a positive. While this lack of concern over national defense has been apparent for a while, it has become increasingly noted as more foreign journalists and observers have come to Taiwan.

It is not surprising that Tsai’s strident comments about resisting China had little effect in rousing voters given that, at this point, it seems more like posturing rather than a call for concrete action.

But while some voters may have been apathetic, other voters may have felt even more anxious given that tensions with China have worsened significantly and concerns about war have risen over the past two years. It is not surprising that this may have caused some to withhold support from the DPP or vote for parties such as the KMT—in the hope that appeasing Beijing might prevent a war by reducing tensions.

Of course, foreign policy is usually not a big part of local elections, which made Tsai’s anti-China message a desperate gesture. But the truth is that it was also her strongest card. In many ways, the DPP has simply not done a very good job in power.

Under Tsai, Taiwan has received a lot of attention, plaudits, and visits from Western politicians since 2020. Tsai has done several interviews with foreign outlets such as the BBC and CNN, though none with Taiwanese media since at least 2019. All this has obscured several significant problems in Taiwan.

In fairness, the handling of COVID-19 in Taiwan was one of the Tsai government’s biggest successes—until early 2021. Since then, the authorities have made several missteps during both an outbreak in 2021 that led to several months of semi-lockdown and an outbreak that began in 2022.

The 2021 outbreak saw the authorities taken by surprise and a vaccine shortage caused in part by the government’s inability to procure adequate vaccines. The government tried to pin the blame on China, such as when there were issues in obtaining the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, whose distribution rights in the region were held by a Chinese company. Eventually, Taiwan had to rely on vaccine donations from the United States and Japan, as well as purchases facilitated by Terry Gou, founder of Foxconn.

Another related controversy involved a domestic COVID vaccine that was fast-tracked through approvals without having yet undergone stage-three trials and that was dogged by allegations of government ties to the vaccine maker and insider trading. Until late last year, the government refused to disclose the price it had paid to purchase the vaccine, which also had a low take-up rate from the public, resulting in more than 30 percent of its remaining supply having to be disposed of due to expiration.

Constant changes in COVID rules and policies that frustrated and confused the public, the skyrocketing of deaths from more than 860 at the start of 2022 to over 15,000 cumulative deaths since 2020 by the end of the year, have also chipped away at support of the government’s handling of the pandemic.

The DPP also experienced an embarrassing plagiarism scandal that has dented its reputation and raised concerns about transparency. In August, the DPP candidate for Taoyuan mayor, Lin Chih-chien, who at 47 and as the former two-term mayor of Hsinchu City was then a rising DPP star, was forced to end his candidacy after being found to have plagiarized both of his master’s theses. What made it worse was that despite the revocation of Lin’s theses by his alma maters, Tsai and other party leaders continued to back the candidate until he pulled out of the race.

In a suspiciously reciprocal move, similar plagiarism accusations were then launched by a government body against an opposition candidate for Hsinchu City mayor over her Ph.D. thesis. She ended up winning her race in what may have been a rebuke by voters to the DPP. Since then, two more DPP politicians—the outgoing mayor of Taoyuan and a legislator—have had their graduate degrees revoked due to alleged plagiarism of their theses.

There was also shocking news last summer that thousands of Taiwanese were going to Cambodia to “work,” with hundreds later having been lured and held by gangs and needing to be rescued. This came despite Taiwan’s GDP growth being high during the pandemic years, rising by more than 6 percent for 2021 and driven by strong tech exports, which indicates the prosperity has been unevenly concentrated.

Inexplicably, Taiwan is also experiencing a spate of violent crimes, highlighted by a local variation of the Cambodia job trap in which more than 60 Taiwanese were kidnapped and held in various locations on the island by local gangs, with three having died in captivity.

There has also been the murder of two policemen by a fugitive, a mass shooting at an office that killed four people, a public shootout, and the killing of a man in a city hospital. A female candidate from a small opposition party was even brutally beaten by a stranger while campaigning in Taipei days before the election. In a normally peaceful country, these were shocking events.

Tsai may enjoy substantial international plaudits for standing up to China, but that by itself is not enough to paper over significant problems at home—nor a lackadaisical approach to national defense that has left Taiwan in a precarious geopolitical position.

If the DPP can’t solve these problems and connect the rhetoric of national defense with practical measures that the public respects, its chances in the 2024 presidential election look slim.