I have a piece out in the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy on Chinese efforts to influence Taiwan politics, and why they failed in the January 2020 elections. After the DPP lost badly in the 2018 local elections, there was a lot of speculation (see, e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) that Beijing would be emboldened by these results and expand its efforts to sway the 2020 campaign and turn President Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP out of office, or failing that, would find ways to delegitimize the results and destabilize Taiwan's democracy. In the end, that didn't happen: Tsai recovered from a politically shaky first term to win an even larger share of the vote than in 2016, the DPP held onto its legislative majority, and Tsai's main opponent, Han Kuo-yu of the KMT, openly conceded defeat on election night.
In the article, I lay out several reasons why these fears did not come to pass in 2020, and why Taiwan's democracy has repeatedly proven resilient to PRC pressure campaigns.
In the article, I lay out several reasons why these fears did not come to pass in 2020, and why Taiwan's democracy has repeatedly proven resilient to PRC pressure campaigns.
- The CCP is still pretty bad at influencing public opinion: Beijing's covert influence operations have been surprisingly clumsy, badly disguised, and at odds with the long-term goals of Taiwan policy under Xi Jinping.
- Partisanship can be a good thing: The high salience of the China factor and Taiwan's partisan divides make it hard to execute the kind of United Front-led, covert and coercive activities that the CCP favors for most of its influence operations elsewhere in the world.
- State capacity lives: The Taiwanese state is still quite capable of responding effectively to the threat of foreign interference in elections when it takes them seriously, and the 2018 elections provided a belated wake-up call to this danger.
- A free society helps: Taiwanese civil society, including parts of the media and NGOs, as well as private social media companies, managed to mitigate the impact of disinformation. Facebook, for instance, took down over a hundred Han Kuo-yu fan pages the month before the election for "inauthentic activity."
- Low-tech elections are an important backstop for democracy: Taiwan's election management system is very low-tech, but it is also transparent, accurate, efficient, fast, and fair. (For more details, see here.) Nobody disputed the election results, shocking as they were to some of Han Kuo-yu's core supporters who had believed the polls were fake and that Tsai would lose. The high trust in the voting and counting process had a lot to do with that.
The full article is available via Project Muse, and access is free through August 15, 2020.
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