How Will Taiwan’s New President Handle China?

On May 20, in a ceremony in Taipei, Lai Ching-te is scheduled to be inaugurated as the next leader of Taiwan. Currently vice president, Lai is taking over from President Tsai Ing-wen at a delicate moment in Taiwan’s relations with Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regards the self-ruling island of 23 million people as a renegade province to be unified with the mainland by force, if necessary. And although Taiwan has managed to maintain significant trade and interpersonal ties to mainland China while postponing discussions over its sovereignty, this ambiguous status quo has recently frayed amid political headwinds from both Beijing and Taipei. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has explicitly made taking Taiwan part of his plans to “rejuvenate” China. But Taiwan’s people are less interested than ever in unifying with the mainland.

When Lai, a known China skeptic, triumphed in January’s election, international headlines suggested that Taiwan’s voters had worsened this breach by keeping the presidency in the hands of the Democratic Progressive Party, to which Tsai and Lai both belong. The DPP has historically advocated that Taiwan alter its constitution to formally declare independence, although the party’s political candidates today say they have no plans to do so. Lai himself was once a vocal independence activist. As a result, CCP leaders in Beijing despise the DPP and Lai as irreconcilable separatists.

But despite such media attention, the 2024 election was not an overwhelming victory for Taiwanese voters favoring independence. The DPP’s supporters may have celebrated Lai’s victory in the streets of Taipei, but the party’s own strategists did not. In the 2016 and 2020 elections, voters elected Tsai with more than half the ballots cast and awarded the party unprecedented legislative majorities. This time around, Taiwan’s voters rendered a mixed verdict. Lai won with only a plurality; the island’s more China-friendly opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), now controls a larger bloc in parliament. Had the KMT successfully struck a joint-ticket deal with a popular third-party insurgent, Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), it might have won the presidency. Lai’s victory, then, does not symbolize some new provocation in the dispute with Beijing. Nor does it signal voters’ endorsement of pro-independence politicians over pro-Chinese candidates. Instead, January’s election was a muddle—the sort that healthy democracies sometimes deliver.

Outside powers should respond accordingly. Despite Beijing’s dislike of the DPP, and the CCP’s evident discomfort with a free vote held on its doorstep, the results of January’s contest need not invite disaster. Rather, China is now looking at a Taiwan in which Beijing’s most implacable political foe, the DPP, is electorally diminished. Washington, meanwhile, must understand Lai’s precarious position and the party’s internal tensions so it can play the ambiguous hand dealt by Taiwanese voters. If U.S. leaders wish to bolster deterrence across the Taiwan Strait, they can now do so in a political climate less likely to generate initiatives (such as sensitive referendum votes) that a more emboldened DPP might have been tempted to take. Lai has declared that he will continue the “no surprises” status quo embodied by his predecessor. Beijing, Taipei, and Washington may therefore be able to breathe easier, at least in the near term, instead of girding for conflict—and if they play their cards right, they may yet buy more time for peace.

NEW SHOOTS

Born in rural Taiwan in 1959, Lai was raised by a single working-class mother after his father died in a mining accident. His parents grew up under the Japanese empire, which ruled Taiwan as a showcase colony featuring hallmarks of modernity such as electrification, roads, and baseball leagues, until Tokyo’s surrender at the end of World War II. The island then came under the control of the Chinese nationalist KMT, whose forces were fighting a losing civil war on the mainland against Mao Zedong’s communist insurgency. After KMT troops, escorted by U.S. Navy ships, arrived in Taiwan in 1945, they proceeded to brutalize locals suspected of harboring Japanese or left-wing sympathies.

In 1949, the remnants of the KMT—including its leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek—fled to Taiwan after losing to communist forces. As Mao consolidated power and founded the People’s Republic of China, the nationalist exiles maintained their separate and competing government in Taipei: the Republic of China. Both governments claimed sovereignty over the island and the mainland. Mao and Chiang agreed on little but concurred that Taiwan was part of China. The contest between PRC and ROC turned the Taiwan Strait into a Cold War frontier, with the “Red” Chinese mainland facing an island stronghold of “Free China.” The moniker was a bitter joke to local Taiwanese who resented the Washington-backed junta in Taipei, feeling themselves neither free nor Chinese.

In Lai’s youth, Taiwanese politics were dominated by martial law under the one-party rule of the KMT, which ran the government, military, and society through a corps of political commissars. These elites saw themselves as the continent’s legitimate government, unwillingly exiled to a peripheral province, and ruled native islanders accordingly. In school, the “national language” of Mandarin was mandatory; the Lai family’s Hokkien dialect, forbidden. Textbooks taught Chinese history and literature from a continental perspective. Students were drilled to be “exemplary Chinese” in preparation for the KMT’s eventual recovery of the mainland from what the party called “communist bandits.” The security services persecuted activists who campaigned for locals’ civic and economic rights, and Chiang’s cronies favored fellow exiled mainlanders over native-born islanders for posts in politics and business.

If Beijing, Taipei, and Washington play their cards right, they may yet buy more time for peace.

But in 1987, Chiang’s son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, lifted martial law and slowly moved to democratize Taiwan. The junior Chiang, once the KMT’s spy chief, bowed to pressure from Washington and rising civic activism at home by releasing political prisoners and widening freedoms. Eventually, elements of the KMT elite also softened their stance on former communist foes across the strait. Beijing, after all, had embraced elements of capitalism, welcoming investors from Taiwan who hailed from old mainlander money. And in so doing, the CCP had made China rich and strong.

As Taiwan’s rival political parties began competing in free elections, underground agitators for democracy and formal independence emerged into the open, founding the DPP. Democratization spurred the KMT, now obliged to win votes, to recast itself as a normal political party. Given the KMT’s repressive past and lingering ties to China, however, many native middle-aged Taiwanese voters remain deeply distrustful of the organization. Some DPP stalwarts even fear that older KMT voters sentimental toward China will form a fifth column and assist Beijing in the event of an invasion.

Lai came of age against this evolving political landscape. As a boy, he read kung-fu fantasy novels and dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player but eventually, heeding his mother’s advice, pursued medicine. Lai won renown in Taiwan as a spinal specialist and earned a public health degree from Harvard. After leading a physicians’ professional association, he was elected to a parliamentary seat in 1996. An assured politician with carefully coifed hair, Lai represented a district for over a decade in Tainan, a city full of Hokkien-speaking native Taiwanese that reliably elects DPP candidates.

Through his tenure in Taiwan’s occasionally unruly parliament, Lai earned a reputation for candor and, occasionally, confrontation. In 2005, he was captured on video shouting at an opponent in frustration over a defense budget bill. Then, as now, the presidency was held by a DPP candidate, Chen Shui-bian, but the parliament was dominated by the KMT, which was holding up military appropriations meant to deter Beijing. Incensed, Lai turned to a KMT legislator and bellowed, “You block everything!” The video, which went viral, captured Lai’s frustration with what he perceived as the KMT’s soft position on China. Three years later, with a massive corruption scandal hanging over the DPP, the KMT recaptured the presidency and retained parliament. Taipei’s stance toward China soon grew more cordial as the KMT government cut spending on defense and promoted more trade and tourism across the strait.

THE PATH TO POWER

When Lai traded his parliamentary seat for the mayoralty of Tainan in 2010, he was already tipped as a possible future presidential candidate. His rhetoric on Taiwan’s sovereignty and independence thrilled the DPP’s base. Some party insiders murmured that Lai might be stronger presidential timber than Tsai, then the party’s chairwoman, who had never lived or worked in the south of the island. But Tsai, a former trade lawyer and Taipei technocrat, had spent her opposition years diligently salvaging the DPP’s tarnished brand after Chen’s wreck of an administration. Regarded as capable by her peers and the electorate, she became the party’s nominee.

Tsai’s prospects as a 2016 candidate were buoyed by protests against the incumbent KMT government by the youthful Sunflower Movement. The demonstrations began in 2014 when students, outraged by a KMT-backed trade bill that would have opened sensitive economic sectors such as the media to mainland Chinese investment, occupied parliament. They ultimately succeeded in blocking the law, helping propel the DPP to capture both parliament and the presidency in 2016.

As a candidate, Tsai repeatedly promised to maintain the status quo when it came to China. Nonetheless, when she took office, Beijing was contemptuous—and Washington, wary. Observers anxious about mounting tensions with China worried that internal DPP party pressure might win out over Tsai’s cautious instincts, pushing her to use her presidential powers or legislative majority to attempt constitutional changes or other moves toward formal independence for Taiwan. Yet Tsai kept her word and held off on making drastic moves, disappointing her party’s base but providing stable leadership. She won reelection by a large margin.

U.S. policymakers must wind back their own inflammatory and unhelpful rhetoric over Taiwan.

Despite Tsai’s electoral success, the DPP’s base vote clearly favored a candidate in the mold of Lai. His seasoning in the southern byways of Taiwanese politics made him both a valuable ally and a dangerous rival. With Lai’s star rising, Tsai appointed him premier in 2017—only for him step down in 2019, along with other party leaders, after DPP midterm losses. In his resignation speech, Lai portentously cited a line from a trilogy by his favorite kung-fu novelist (Jin Yong, also a favorite of Chinese President Xi Jinping), assuring his supporters that “We will meet another day upon the rivers and the lakes.” His words, a winking nod to the roiling factional struggles in martial-arts fiction, foreshadowed real-life political intrigue: with Tsai weakened, Lai challenged her in the party’s 2020 presidential primary, unprecedented for a sitting incumbent. She prevailed, but Lai took about 27 percent of the vote and was given the vice-presidential slot on Tsai’s winning ticket.

Now, Lai has made it to the top of Taiwanese politics. Yet thanks to the KMT’s parliamentary success, his inauguration appears less a confident passing of the baton than an awkward political transition. The preferred candidate of the pro-independence voter base has arrived in office at the exact moment that DPP has lost the ability to fulfill the political aspirations of its most ardent constituents.

Moreover, after eight years in office, the party is no longer a fresh face. In the January election, youth voters gravitated toward Ko, the charismatic third-party candidate. A social media sensation, surgeon, and former mayor of Taipei with a more conciliatory stance toward China, Ko won a quarter of the presidential vote, and his insurgent TPP won enough seats in parliament to hold the balance of legislative power. Lai’s KMT opponent in the election, Hou Yu-ih, may also be the kind of candidate who can challenge the DPP in the future. The mayor of a Taipei suburb, Hou is a former police chief and native-born islander who speaks folksy Hokkien and acknowledges that Taiwan needs a credible military deterrent.

LIVING BENEATH THE DAM

Visitors to Taiwan often remark on how calm daily life seems, in contrast to foreign headlines that suggest war with China could come at any minute. In private conversations, Taiwanese citizens will confess unease, like residents of a town at the foot of a shaky dam holding back a rising reservoir. Still, few can imagine an overwhelming invasion in the coming months or years, and they do not vote based on the China issue alone. In fact, the electoral battle between the DPP, the KMT, and the insurgent TPP was fought as much over issues such as education and housing as it was over identity and security. Opinion polls show that most residents of Taiwan today, including descendants of mainlanders, do identify as “Taiwanese” rather than “Chinese.” But they value their democratic system more than an affiliation with any individual party. In his victory speech, Lai said the DPP was chastened by the lukewarm results. He pledged to reflect on the voters’ message to his party.

By voting for a divided government, Taiwan’s voters have forced leaders in not only Taipei but also Beijing to adapt to a more nuanced political reality. Chinese President Xi Jinping is clearly impatient for progress on Taiwan, asserting in speeches that the issue cannot be handed down indefinitely from one generation to the next. Beijing has adopted an increasingly aggressive posture toward the island through such measures as cyberattacks, military patrols, hard-elbowed diplomacy, and disinformation campaigns. But the split in Taipei lessens the likelihood of a seismic constitutional or symbolic shift on sovereignty that the CCP might feel forces its hand to invade. If Lai and his administration successfully bolster deterrence, he may yet persuade Xi that any attempt to invade Taiwan runs too big a risk of wrecking the CCP’s other plans for China’s so-called “great rejuvenation.”

The United States, meanwhile, can use the space created by Taiwan’s political muddle to reaffirm Washington’s commitment to the status quo. U.S. policymakers and pundits can begin by winding back their own inflammatory and unhelpful rhetoric over the issue. If Washington aims to bolster asymmetric deterrence through arms sales and training, for instance, policymakers should take care to expand such programs without fanfare or political posturing. The overriding objective should be to postpone the date of any potential conflict as far as possible into the future, in hopes that the political landscape will shift to allow for a peaceful, permanent settlement. Such patience is, after all, the route that Lai has chosen. As he stated in a television interview in December, quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, “supreme excellence” is “breaking an opponent’s will without a fight.”