- Hong Kong’s protests have changed the fortunes of Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP, putting their opponents in an awkward position
- But even Tsai must walk a line between gaining politically from the protests and incurring Beijing’s full wrath
Hong Kong's protests have decisively reversed Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen's fortunes ahead of the January election. According to a study by pro-independence publication My Formosa, between February and August, Tsai's support climbed from 27.3 per cent to 52.1 per cent, while Han Kuo-yu, representing the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang, declined from 51.8 per cent to 33.4 per cent.
Over the same period, approval for Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party has surged from 26.3 per cent to 40.6 per cent, while the KMT's has dropped from 34.8 per cent to 29.5 per cent.
The DPP appears to have emerged unscathed from a cigarette-smuggling scandal, even though it cost the jobs of the National Security Bureau director general and several of the president's security details.
Tsai has vocally supported the demonstrations against China's deepening encroachment in Hong Kong, raising the spectre of "Hong Kong today and Taiwan tomorrow". After 1 million Hongkongers marched on June 9, Tsai trumpeted that "one country, two systems" would never be an option for Taiwan.
Yet, in the eyes of KMT chairman Wu Den-yih, comparing self-ruled Taiwan to Hong Kong is false because, unlike Hong Kong, the island is a "sovereign and independent state". At a recent rally in New Taipei, Han denounced the DPP's rhetoric as "nonsense", saying that while he supports Hongkongers' pursuit of democracy and freedom, he does not agree with "exploiting Hong Kong's plight".
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Former Hong Kong chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, explaining the rationale behind Beijing's individual travel ban to the island, has accused the DDP government of sponsoring Hong Kong protests. Tsai's office has categorically denied funding such efforts.
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This has not stopped commentators from observing public interactions between members of Taiwan's Sunflower Movement from 2014 and Hong Kong's pro-democracy activists. On July 15, the DPP appointed Lin Fei-fan, a Sunflower leader, to deputy secretary general responsible for youth outreach.
In recent years, Lin has cheered on the Hong Kong youth movement, appearing in public pictures with Joshua Wong Chi-fung, Nathan Law Kwun-chung and other pro-democracy activists.
Still, Tsai rules out any refugee legislation granting asylum to Hong Kong protesters facing rioting charges, despite an appeal from Wong during his visit to Taiwan in early September. She argues that Taiwan's existing laws are sufficient to help Hongkongers in Taiwan on humanitarian grounds.
But critics have voiced concerns that the existing mechanism requires a long process and does not afford official status to asylum seekers. Thus, Tsai seems to be treading a fine line: doing enough to incite voters' anti-China anxiety, but not enough to incur China's full wrath.
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The China Times, a pro-Beijing paper published in Taiwan, argues that the island should not exploit the Hong Kong debacle for electoral votes: "For some in (the DPP) who do not recognise themselves as Chinese, the infighting among the Chinese is not a tragedy, but their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," it said.
Citing a popular reference to Hong Kong's protests as a gun falling into Tsai's lap, The China Times argues that Tsai's team could utilise military intervention in Hong Kong by Beijing as a "cannon" against her "pro-China" opponents.
Former vice-president Annette Lu Hsiu-lien, who quit the DPP in 2018 and has entered the presidential race as an independent, considers Tsai self-aggrandising in seizing on Hong Kong's turmoil to claim that only she can save Taiwan.
At the same time, despite rejecting "one country, two systems" for Taiwan, the KMT has come under fire for lacking a clear position on Hong Kong. Even Terry Gou, who at the last minute decided against joining the presidential race as an independent, has criticised the failure of Hong Kong's political system while avoiding outright support for the protests (at least since his June 12 statement that he would "open my arms" to immigrants from Hong Kong).
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Essentially, while Taiwanese politicians of all stripes realise the public apprehension about Hong Kong, they also know the boundaries of such support.
A poll by the pro-DPP Cross-Strait Policy Association on August 16 showed sharply divided opinions: 40.9 per cent thought the government should offer more support to the Hong Kong protests; 43.1 per cent held the opposite view.
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Will the Taiwan election play into Beijing's calculations on the Hong Kong protests? China has every incentive to overthrow the pro-independence leadership in Taiwan: 96 per cent of mainland Chinese surveyed by Tianya Forum online in January 2018 saw a Tsai-led government as conducive to reunification by force, a sentiment echoed by militant scholars.
Political activist Guang Jun Gao, meanwhile, argues that Hong Kong and Taiwan will never have true democracy as long as China is entrenched in one-party autocracy.
In fact, in the shadow of a global anti-China sentiment spearheaded by the US government, Taiwan's presidential election is widely dubbed as a "proxy war" between the US and China. But aren't both the election in Taiwan and Hong Kong's politics more a referendum on China's political system than anything else?
Chiu-Ti Jansen, with advanced degrees from Yale and Columbia, is the founder of multimedia platform China Happenings and a former corporate partner of international law firm Sidley Austin
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