By Harsh Pandey
Taiwan, one of the four Asian Tigers, is going to elections on 13th January. The small island nation is not recognised as a state by the majority of the world’s states except a few. Its entangled history with China makes these elections really interesting. As far as history is concerned, during World War II China was fighting a Civil War between the Communist Party of China under the leadership of Mao Zedong and the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-shek. As war ended with Communists winning over the Nationalists of China in 1949 making two different entities People’s Republic of China which was headed by Communists controlled large parts of China making the capital Beijing. Kai-Shek led Kuomintang to create a government in exile in Taiwan naming it the Republic of China. While Communist-ruled China considers Taiwan as one of its renegade provinces, after the war the two entities have led different systems of government where Taiwan is a multi-party democracy and holds regular elections. On the other hand, China operates as a party state where Communist party officials are in charge of the executive legislature and judiciary.
Taiwan’s Defence Ministry mistranslates an alert, erroneously saying China launched a missile
These differences have led to the development of an independent Taiwanese identity other than that of Communist China. The Chinese political establishment has made it clear that they want to reunite both entities under the same political fold as earlier they did with Macau and Hong Kong. Taiwan’s 23 million people are in no mood to give up on their economy and political system. The 13th January presidential elections will be decisive not just for the future of Taiwan and China but also for the World.
The current President of Taiwan Tsai Ing-wen is from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which won the 2016 elections and China has not engaged with her alleging her pro-US stance. Ms. Ing-wen is about to complete her two terms and due to constitutional mandate, she cannot run for office again. Current Vice-President of Taiwan Lai Ching-te is running for the top office from DPP. The main opposition to DPP comes from Kuomintang (KMT) whose Hou Yu-Ih happened to be the popular mayor of the Taiwanese city of New Taipei. While DPP is known for its pro-US stance in the wake of any existential threat to the island nation, the KMT party establishment is however not in support of Taiwan uniting with China but argues for closer ties. Ko Wen-je from Taiwan’s People’s Party (TPP) is also contesting for presidential elections. Wen-je is a former Taipei mayor. His party is relatively small and there were talks of TPP and KMT combined elections however it has not culminated into reality giving DPP a greater chance to win the elections. Terry Gou the tech billionaire and founder of Foxconn which is the main supplier of the tech giant Apple has also seen interest in running for the office but withdrew his name after his candidacy was not able to create buzz among the Taiwanese population. However, this was not the only reason for Gau’s withdrawal.
The earlier elections in Taiwan were fought on domestic political issues such as housing, development, and jobs, the central issue in this election is China. China’s unhappiness towards the ruling DPP which it claims to be ‘separatists’ and support towards the KMT has been called a choice of ‘peace over war’ by China. Terry Gou who was earlier interested in the elections when Chinese officials started an Income-Tax probe against him, dropped out of the race because China thought KMT’s road to winning the elections might be impacted by Gou’s candidacy. DPP on the other hand accused KMT officials of being pawns by the hands of China and ‘closer ties’ with Beijing means provincialization of Taiwan which Hong Kong has suffered in recent years. Taiwan alleges that China has adopted the strategy of cognitive warfare where it is using all the means at its disposal to manipulate the elections.
When the election was relatively far China used coercion such as defying Taiwan’s sovereignty by entering into its airspace many times but also fired missiles and performed military drills dangerously close to the island. Whenever some foreign dignitaries came to visit Taiwan, China intensified its military drills along the straits of Taiwan, China also used economic coercion against Taiwan. China has banned pineapple fruits coming from Taiwan which cost about 284 million US$. The ban caused a drop in the prices of pineapple and unrest among the farmers of Taiwan and they are worried about the political situation of the island nation.
However, as the elections have started coming near China has changed its tactics and largely invested itself in cognitive warfare. As alleged by Taiwanese authorities China has created misinformation campaigns that particularly involve the United States of America where it is portrayed that the USA is a not dependable ally of Taiwan and it will betray Taiwan the way it has betrayed Afghanistan. Another misinformation happened in the name of Taiwanese being given ‘poisonous’ pork imported from the US. The third in the series of disinformation was that the Taiwanese government harvested blood from its population and gave it to the US to make bio-weapons against China. These are a few examples of at what level misinformation operates in Taiwanese society. In the last ten years, the nation has become the most vulnerable against misinformation. China caters to local Taiwanese politicians from time to time in order to develop pro-China sentiments in the political elites of Taiwan. There is a preferential treatment given to pro-China influencers on Chinese social media platforms such as TikTok.
An important question one can ask is why the world should pay heed to elections which are purely internal matters of a nation. The simple answer is that the world is dependent on Taiwan for many critical things. The most essential of them is the supply of semiconductors. Taiwan produces 60 per cent of total produced semiconductor chips worldwide. Taiwanese companies are also critical for the supply chains of computer machines. In an already high-intensity conflict-ridden world where two big wars are already happening, whose impact is visible on the citizens of the world, another conflict in Taiwan will only worsen it. It is also critical to understand that democracy is an ideal that Taiwan has achieved through a long struggle and built its institutional checks and balances which are working fine if there is no external interference involved. These elections are also critical in the sense that for the first time in a democracy, the misuse of Artificial Intelligence technology is visible in the name of cognitive warfare, misinformation and deep fakes, which can be misused in other democracies too. In this case, the world needs to look at the plays and tactics that can be used to curtail democracy and also the voice of the Taiwanese people.
The author is a PhD Researcher at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
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