The Geopolitical Implications of the Taiwan Presidential Election

The Taiwanese presidential election, January 13th, is of substantial importance for regional and global politics and would have been watched closely in Beijing and Washington. The 2024 poll, the eighth time Taiwanese people have voted for their leader since democratisation in 1996, saw William Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) secure a third successive Presidential electoral victory. Amidst increasingly fractious relations across the Taiwan Strait with China, Taiwan-Chinese relations dominated campaigning and Lai’s victory, a man labeled as a ‘troublemaker’ in Beijing, will do little to assuage regional fears of increasingly fraught cross-Strait relations. 

The contenders

 The incumbent president Tsai Ing-wen, whose DPP have ruled since 2016, was ineligible due to term-limits. William Lai Ching-te, who served as Vice-President under Tsai, was selected as the DPP candidate. Lai’s selection, a former doctor and Mayor of southern Taiwanese city Tainan, reinforces the DPP’s role in heading a ‘pan-Green’ coalition of parties that favours increased Taiwanese autonomy away from China. Whilst the DPP was founded in the 1980s with formal Taiwanese independence as a key objective, this position has softened somewhat in the intervening years. Yet Lai himself has often been closely associated with support for formal independence, even referring to himself as a ‘pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence’, a red line for Beijing. 

Alternatively, the Kuomintang (KMT) or Chinese Nationalist Party, the DPP’s foremost opponents in the election, heads a ‘pan-Blue’ coalition that seeks greater integration with mainland China and holds a long-standing objective of peaceful cross-Strait reunification, although in recent years the maintenance of the status-quo between Taiwan and China has taken precedence. The KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih, a former police officer and Mayor of New Taipei City, grounded his campaign in his working-class roots and his earnest approach garnered much support for a party that has struggled to connect with Taiwanese voters in recent years. However, concerns about the KMT’s perceived naivety in approaching relations with China stalked Hou Yu-ih’s campaign.  

Finally, positioned as a ‘third way’ candidate, was Ko Wen-je, mayor of Taipei from 2014 to 2022, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in 2019. Like Lai, Ko is a former doctor, yet he sought to distinguish himself from the DPP by departing from Lai’s stringent Taiwanese autonomy approach to cross-Strait relations whilst also recognising the risks of extensive economic integration with China as posed by the KMT and Hou Yu-ih. Ko Wen-je’s pragmatic approach to cross-Strait relations sought to elicit the support of young Taiwanese looking beyond the two established parties and their polarised approaches to cross-Strait relations. His 26% vote-share sends a clear message to both the DPP and KMT that, increasingly, there is a demand in Taiwan for nuance in addressing cross-Strait relations. 

The final poll before the election placed Lai of the DPP as the frontrunner with an average of 36%, with Hou’s KMT second with 31% and Ko’s TPP sitting in third with 24% of the vote. Notably, talks between Hou’s KMT and Ko’s TPP to form a unity ticket collapsed in November 2023, and will have caught the eye of DPP officials that a KMT-TPP coalition could have posed a considerable challenge to the DPP. The initial results, per Reuters,  saw Lai’s DPP win 40.1% of the Presidential vote, with Hou’s KMT achieving 33.5% and Ko’s TPP 26.5%. In contrast to the 50% landslide vote share garnered by the DPP in 2020, support for the DPP is down, with the votes for Taiwan’s parliament, the Legislative Yuan, that ran parallel to the Presidential election, seeing the DPP lose its majority. Both significant shifts in electoral support will serve as a clear marker to the DPP that their approach to China, as well as key domestic issues such as Taiwan’s rising cost-of-living crisis and social care burden will need to be reconsidered over the coming four years. 

Regional implications

Intrinsic to Taiwanese elections is the shadow cast by China. Officially the Chinese contend that Taiwanese elections hold little significance, given Beijing’s stringent position that Taiwan is a province of China. However, China’s long-standing position that the ‘one-China principle’, which contends that there is only one China to which Taiwan is a part as opposed to ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China and one Taiwan’, is quintessential to cross-Strait relations and underscores a clear preference in Beijing for parties that recognise the ‘one-China principle’. Crucially, Tsai Ing-wen’s DPP government that has ruled since 2016 has refuted the one-China premise and as such Xi Jinping’s administration broke off relations as a result. As such, Lai’s and the DPP’s continual reticence on the one-China principle stands in stark contrast to Hou and the KMT’s support for the principle, with Hou Yu-ih the logical preferred candidate in Beijing. Whilst it is unclear whether the return of the KMT to government in Taipei would have quelled Chinese assertiveness and re-opened cross-Strait communication, the DPP’s victory makes it highly unlikely that the Chinese will relent in the aerial sorties that have continuously flown military aircraft in close proximity to Taiwan and equally paints a bleak picture for future engagement between a DPP government in Taipei and China. Moreover, China’s widely reported interference in Taiwan’s election has proved unsuccessful in preventing a DPP victory, and will cast a long-shadow over the early months of Lai’s presidency as he seeks to re-evaluate cross-Strait relations. 

Moreover, many other governments in the Asia-Pacific will have watched the election with keen interest, however two in particular, the United States and Japan, will be particularly vigilant on how the election impacts regional relations. Firstly, it is telling that all three of the candidates visited the United States in 2023, for the United States has served as the de-facto security guarantor of Taiwan since the Cold War. Rising Chinese belligerence has reinforced the importance of currying favour in Washington for Taiwanese presidential candidates, with Lai of the DPP in particular setting his sights on a presidential visit to the White House, stating that “If a Taiwanese president can enter the White House, we will have achieved the political objective that we have been pursuing”. Such a proclamation will elicit concern in Beijing, who have rebuked the extensive diplomatic exchanges between the United States and Taiwan under US President Joe Biden as ‘reckless and provocative’. Washington has, since Barack Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, worked closely with DPP governments. Tsai Ing-wen oversaw a considerable bolstering of US-Taiwan relations, whilst US officials have grown frustrated with the perceived naiveté of KMT candidates who favour extensive economic integration with China, which the US views as damaging Taiwanese leverage. As such, whilst not made explicit, it can be inferred that the U.S. supported the continuity candidate William Lai of the DPP and will continue to enhance U.S.-Taiwan’s ‘unofficial’ relations. 

Taiwan has increasingly become a key facet of Japan’s regional approach in recent years. Japan and Taiwan share a convoluted colonial history which divides opinion amongst Taiwanese, whilst Japanese soft-power is particularly potent amongst the younger population of Taiwan. Moreover, Taipei has, since democratisation, placed fellow democracy Japan as a key partner in East Asia and ‘assiduously’ sought to cultivate ties with Tokyo. Similarly, in light of Taiwan’s crucial geostrategic position, successive governments have feared Taiwan’s reunification with China and the isolating impact it would have on sea flows towards Japanese ports. As such, Tokyo will have likely hoped for a continuation of DPP governance under William Lai, and will see the DPP’s victory as a boon for the strong ‘unofficial in name only’ relations between Japan and Taiwan.

Finally, numerous South-east Asian governments will look closely at the resilience of Taiwan’s democracy in the build up to and immediate aftermath of the election. Ranked as Asia’s foremost democracy, how Taiwan weathers the storm of growing Chinese disinformation and interference will be of immense interest to fellow nascent democracies such as Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, as they grapple with growing regional Chinese presence.

Global implications

 Taiwan’s elections have significant implications globally. Should cross-Strait relations continue to deteriorate under the new DPP Taiwanese government it is likely that the existing animosity will become entrenched, with frozen cross-Strait relations reaching their twelfth year by the end of Lai’s four-year term. Should Beijing seek to escalate the tensions the result would be considerable strain on global supply chains, for Taiwan is both the world’s largest producer of semiconductor chips, that play a key role in almost all technological products, and a key facet of global shipping, with just under half of the world’s operational container ships passing through the Taiwan Strait in the first half of 2022. Any escalation in the Taiwan Strait following the election or during the election cycle would defer considerable costs globally in a manner reminiscent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

As such, the geopolitical implications of the 2024 Taiwan presidential election, and Lai’s victory are considerable. The outcome in the immediate aftermath of January’s historic vote will offer a distinct insight into the trajectory of US-China competition in the Indo-Pacific and will provide a litmus test to the resilience of democracy in the region. The DPP’s victory will have provided governments in Beijing, Washington and beyond a clear marker for the future trajectory of cross-Strait relations and democracy in the Asia-Pacific more broadley and how those governments respond will be seismic for regional and global stability.