‘High winds, strong waves’: China hammered by Taiwan election blowback

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TAIPEI, Taiwan — A historic third consecutive presidential term that Taiwan’s most anti-Beijing party won on Saturday is the latest blowback to China.

It is not just Taiwan. Far beyond Taipei, U.S. allies in Manila, Seoul and Tokyo are resisting Beijing’s increasing aggressiveness across East Asia.

Despite the significant disappointment of the vote in Taiwan, the ruling Chinese Communist Party is not shifting course. Beijing’s determination to one day claim control over the democratic island remains “rock-solid.”

Nor is all entirely rosy for President-elect William Lai and his Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP. The same day the party won the presidency, it lost its majority in the Legislative Yuan, which signals prolonged political infighting and offers potential new openings for China.

The result looks even worse for the more pro-Beijing Kuomintang (KMT) party. Three successive defeats raise questions about the once-dominant party’s viability.

Mr. Lai’s coming leadership after two four-year terms for DPP President Tsai Ing-wen spells “a win for democracy, obviously, and a vote for the status quo,” Lai I-chung, president of Taiwan’s Prospect Foundation, a think tank, told a morning-after briefing for foreign reporters in Taipei.

He said the DPP overcame two obstacles: China’s “heavy election intervention” and Taiwan’s customary “two-term limit” on presidential control. “It was exceptional of the ruling party to win a third term,” he said.

An expression coined in China describes the combination of a new DPP president and a new legislature no longer under the president’s control.

“There is a new term, ‘high winds and strong waves,’ to try to describe the scenario in the next four years,” Arthur Ding, a professor emeritus at Taiwan’s National Ching-cheh University, told the briefing.

Experts anticipate that two upcoming events will spike cross-strait tensions even more.

One is the arrival of a U.S. delegation that the Biden administration has dispatched to Taipei. Local reports say the delegation arrived late Sunday evening and will meet with Mr. Lai on Monday.

The second, a more likely source of stress for Beijing, is Mr. Lai’s May 20 inauguration.

Beijing doubles down

Fellow democratic leaders from Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and the U.S. congratulated Mr. Lai. A statement from Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, carried on the front pages of major Chinese dailies Sunday, had a different tone.

“The results of the two elections in Taiwan this time show that the DPP cannot represent mainstream public opinion on the island,” said the statement, apparently referencing the DPP’s loss of its legislative majority.

“Taiwan is China’s Taiwan,” the statement said. “Our position on resolving the Taiwan issue and achieving national reunification is consistent, and our will is rock-solid.”

“We will … resolutely oppose ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist activities, and work with relevant political parties, groups and people … to promote cross-Strait exchanges,” Beijing’s statement concluded.

Taiwanese voters who spoke to The Washington Times at the polls in Taipei quibbled over their identity as Chinese, but none favored unification with the mainland.

With Beijing having refused communications with Ms. Tsai and her government for eight years, some DPP voters fear Taiwan’s opposition will continue to build unhealthy relations with Beijing. The KMT and a third party in the race, which split the anti-DPP vote by combining to get more than half the presidential vote, say they favor greater engagement with China.

The Chinese “probably will not deal with President Lai,” Mr. Ding said. “They may work better with opposition parties to continue to divide and rule in Taiwan.”

Trapped in its own web

China can apply pressure short of a military conflict. Beijing is constantly deploying air and naval forces to assess Taiwan’s defenses. It stands accused of a disinformation drive aimed at the DPP and a broader “infodemic” designed to undercut Taiwanese faith in democracy.

Beijing’s intimidation tactics in the region include “wolf warrior” diplomacy, economic coercion, belligerent operations in disputed territories, and aggressive fishing and maritime maneuvers.

These efforts have generated pushback.

Japan, which in 2022 pledged a massive increase in defense spending through 2027, is redeploying troops from its northern island, Hokkaido, to the strategic Ryukyu Islands northeast of Taiwan, which is being fortified with missile bases.

Polls show China has overtaken longtime bete noire Japan as the most disliked nation in South Korea. Seoul has cast aside decades of historical animosities with Tokyo to focus on security cooperation against shared threats.

In the Philippines, the government of Ferdinand Marcos II has reversed the pro-China policies of his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte. Last year, Manila invited U.S. troops to rotate through strategic locations across the Philippines.

All this suggests Beijing should shift tactics, but analysts say Chinese President Xi Jinping will likely double down on the pressure campaign.

Mr. Lai’s victory “should tell Beijing it is time to reconsider,” David Keegan, an adjunct professor of Chinese Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said via email. “But there is almost no chance it will.”

Mr. Ding said, “The likelihood for Xi to change his mind is very low.”

In East Asia, where the concept of “face” is critical, China’s leaders are robbed of flexibility. Beijing’s leadership, while avowedly communist, mirrors Chinese dynasties of yore, one scholar said. Those dynasties stood heavily on dignity.

“Why China never changes is a question equivalent to ‘How is China China?’” said Shih Fang-long, a political culture expert at the London School of Economics.

China’s communist rulers, recalling humiliations inflicted by foreign powers in the 19th and 20th centuries, have made anti-colonial struggle and national unification central to their messaging. Macao, formerly colonized by Portugal, and Hong Kong, formerly colonized by Britain, have returned to China as it has grown into a global economic and military power.

Only Taiwan, which was colonized by the Spanish, the Dutch and the Japanese before it was occupied by nationalists defeated by communist forces in 1948, remains outside Beijing’s control.

Having rooted its message in nationalism, a concession on Taiwan would mean that “the CCP regime cannot be justified as legitimate,” Ms. Shih said.

Party hard-liners say China’s rising power trumps Taiwanese votes.

“The strength of the mainland is already here, and the will of 1.4 billion people to complete national reunification is also here,” Hu Xijin, a former editor of Beijing media Global Times, said on the Chinese social media site Weibo. “Who wins the local elections in Taiwan is by no means the most important thing.”

The legislative split

The loss of control of the national legislature has clouded the DPP’s victory.

It will prove “very difficult to pass a budget, and officials will be grilled and not be able to do their own business,” Chen Ming-chi of National Tsing Hua University told reporters. “That will be a big challenge. It is going to be painful.”

China could widen these cracks, particularly debates on Taiwan’s defensive needs and arms purchases.

“The Chinese put out a statement that William Lai is a minority, and that is a way to show the whole world that President Xi’s line is correct,” said the Prospect Foundation’s Mr. Lai. “That is how they are going to justify their approach. … China will make everything difficult for William Lai.”

Yet Beijing could be hamstrung by the political weakness of the opposition KMT.

“The KMT must finally consider whether it is time to abandon the dream of being a China unification party and a party led by the old guard,” said Mr. Keegan, who served 30 years as a China specialist with the U.S. State Department. “Will the KMT look to younger blood? Or will the old guard block that shift once more?”

Mr. Keegan expected the party to reconfigure itself and try to remain a force. Others were uncertain.

“Some of my friends in China worry whether the DPP will become the LDP of Japan,” Mr. Ding said.

That references Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, which maintains a virtually unassailable position at the summit of Japanese policies.

The prospect of permanent DPP control “is not welcome in China’s mainstream opinion,” Mr. Ding said.