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From 2022, during better times for the Taiwan People's Party -- and before the Taipei City election ordinance banned campaign billboards like this one.
What's This?
In the run-up to Taiwan's 2022 local elections, I put together a set of previews on the local mayor's races to help me track the campaign. I've done that again here for 2026.
Part 1. Introduction -- see below.
Introduction
Taiwan's local elections will take place on November 28, 2026. There are contests for over 10,000 different offices, ranging from the mayor of Taipei all the way down to village chiefs in indigenous communities in rural Taitung. In Taiwan these are often called the "9-in-1 elections" (九合一選舉) because they combine voting for nine different types of offices, most of which used to be held at different times, in one single campaign and election day held once every four years. These are:
- (1) Mayors and (2) city councilors in centrally-administered municipalities (直轄市市長，市議員) for Taipei, Kaohsiung, New Taipei City, Taichung, Tainan, and Taoyuan;
- (3) Executives and (4) councilors in counties and county-level municipalities (縣／省轄市長，縣／市議員);
- (5) Township and town heads and (6) councilors (鄉／鎮長，鄉／鎮議員);
- (7) Village and ward heads (村／里長);
- (8) Indigenous "self-governing" district heads and (9) representatives (自治區長，區代表).
This consolidation of election terms and cycles has turned local elections into something like a U.S. federal midterm election. It's obviously a big deal in local politics -- all of Taiwan's elected offices except for the president and the legislature are up for grabs. But it's also a big deal for all three parties that hold seats in the legislature right now, and there are some important if indirect implications for the 2028 races and for the current national political stalemate.
What's at Stake for the Political Parties?
For the KMT, the results will affect Cheng Li-wun's (鄭麗文) influence in the party. As party chairwoman, one of the most important jobs is to manage nominations and coordinate what is increasingly a nationalized election campaign. If the party does well overall, she's well-positioned to steer nominations for the KMT's 2028 presidential and legislative candidates. If it does poorly, there will be mounting pressure on her to step aside, and her influence is likely to decline regardless of whether she does.
For the DPP, the elections will determine whether President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) can hold onto the DPP party chair, and perhaps even whether he'll face an internal party challenger for renomination next year. The precedent here is 2018; then, Tsai Ing-wen had to resign after a terrible showing for the party and then got challenged for the DPP's presidential nomination by...Lai Ching-te, who argued that Tsai was headed for defeat if she was renominated. She beat that back and ended up crushing Han Kuo-yu in the 2020 election, but it wasn't easy. Lai could have to deal with a similar threat if the DPP struggles again in the local races.
And for the TPP, these elections are downright existential. The party peaked in January 2024, when Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) won 26.5% of the presidential vote and the TPP captured eight critical seats to make them the kingmakers in the LY.
But since then they've played a strong hand remarkably badly. They didn't win either of the Legislative Yuan leadership positions despite having the leverage to do so, their former chairman Ko is now appealing a 17-year prison sentence for corruption and banned from running in 2028, their new party chair Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) lost the KMT-TPP joint nomination for New Taipei to a colorless KMT technocrat, Ko's former deputy mayor Huang Shan-shan is no longer in the legislature, and they had to expel legislator Li Zhenxiu (李貞秀) for failing to renounce her PRC citizenship. From a really promising starting point, they've done little in public to distinguish themselves from the KMT over the last 2+ years, and they're now the most disliked of the three major parties.
So, these elections loom as a crucial moment for the TPP: they need to win a couple mayor's races and increase their councilor seats (they won only 14 of 910 in 2022) to demonstrate they are still a viable alternative to the two big parties. But the signs so far aren't great. The party entered into a joint nomination process with the KMT and got very little in return: only in Chiayi County (a deep green stronghold) Chiayi City did the KMT back a TPP candidate rather than the other way around. There is also Hsinchu City, where the incumbent mayor Kao Hung-an (高虹安) is running for re-election as an independent, and the KMT party center has decided not to nominate a candidate there. Kao was a TPP member when she was elected, but she got kicked out of the party resigned after being charged with embezzlement of assistants salaries; she got the charges reduced and got reinstated as mayor, but has not rejoined the party, so the TPP can't really count her as one of their own anymore.
Without any competitive mayoral candidates of its own, the TPP needs a really strong showing in the councilor and township-level mayor's races to dispel the growing impression they're in (perhaps terminal) decline -- especially important for a party that doesn't have many (any?) consistent values or distinct policy goals. Since the TPP's founding in 2019, it has attracted ambitious candidates and staff mostly because it offered a more promising path to power than waiting behind better-connected people in the DPP and KMT. When people stop believing that the TPP will be the winning team in the future, there aren't many people who will stick with the party because they sincerely believe in its mission...or even be able to say what that mission is.
There is clearly still significant electoral demand for a centrist third party that will keep the DPP and KMT honest and push a reform agenda. But the TPP has not done much to actually deliver on that agenda, despite the extraordinary leverage it currently has in the LY. It's hard for me to escape the conclusion the party has peaked and is headed toward the electoral graveyard where the many third parties of the past are buried. We'll see if they can prove the doubters wrong this election.
The Electoral Rules
Demonstrators call on the legislature to pass an absentee voting bill.
Elections in Taiwan are handled by the Central Election Commission following the Public Officials Election and Recall Act. Some key dates for the 2026 elections:
- August 20, 2026: CEC issues the formal election announcement
- August 31: candidate registration opens
- September 4: candidate registration closes
- October 23: candidate ballot order determined by drawing lots
- November 8: voter rolls finalized
- November 13: official campaign period for the special municipality mayors races begins
- November 18: official campaign period for county/city mayor, councilors, township heads, indigenous district chiefs begins. Polling blackout begins.
- November 23: campaign period for local representative (ward/village head, township reps, indigenous district reps) begins
- November 28: Election Day
A few notes about the campaign process for those who aren't familiar with the way elections are practiced in Taiwan.
(1) Restrictions on campaigning aren't really enforced in practice. Despite the official campaign period being only 15 days long for mayors, and even shorter for the other offices, Taiwan has pretty liberal free speech and advertising regulations that override these limits, and candidates have been putting up billboards and out campaigning for months already.
(2) There's a weird twist in Taipei, which in 2022 passed its own ordinance limiting campaign billboards anywhere in the city. This rule is quite a bit stricter than the national standard and moves Taipei incrementally closer to the tight electoral regulatory regimes in place in Japan and especially Korea. (That's not a good thing.) The Taipei ordinance:
- permits campaign advertisements only on official public campaign boards, party and campaign offices, and vehicles;
- defines a campaign advertisement as a poster, banner or billboard having at least three of the following five items: name, image, ballot number, campaign item, and slogan or trademark; and
- applies to everyone, including private individuals not employed by any candidate or campaign.
But it's also full of loopholes -- in 2024 it did little to limit campaign advertising for the 2024 elections. An obvious way to skirt it is to include only two of the five items on any given poster. There is also lax enforcement -- it requires someone to make a complaint before the city government will investigate. And it's also vulnerable to a constitutional challenge (if and when the constitutional court is functional again), not least since it restricts all displays of campaign posters, even on one's own property. (That's even stricter than Japan's rules.)
Nevertheless, this is something to watch this election cycle, as a huge challenge for candidates is to get their names out to uninformed and disengaged voters, and billboards, flags, and posters have long been a key part of this effort. This is the first time local elections in Taipei have been held under this new rule, so it's untested, and advertising is much more important in the low-salience council and ward races than in the legislative and presidential contests.
(3) Taiwan has a polling blackout period that is strictly enforced. No one can publish or share polls from 10 days before the election through Election Day. Taiwan is a poll-crazy place, and this restriction is intended to prevent last-minute polls from affecting voting behavior. The CEC can impose heavy financial penalties on violators, and the blackout is generally respected. We'll see if that remains true this cycle.
(4) There will be at least three referendums only one referendum. The legislature approved three to send to the voters, on:
- introducing caning as a criminal punishment;
- abolishing the government’s 'nuclear-free homeland' policy;
- using traffic fines to improve road safety.
At one point the KMT and TPP were discussing using their legislative majority to refer up to 10 different referendum questions to the voters. Since the legislature also changed the law back to require referendums to be held the same day as the local elections -- reversing a DPP change introduced after a voting fiasco in 2018, which itself was a consequence of a previous DPP-enacted change to the referendum law -- there is a danger that the voting and counting process will get bogged down again. The current CEC chairman You Ying-lung (游盈隆) pleaded with the LY for several months to cut down the number of questions to make the process run more smoothly. And on August 14, they did.
Update 8.28: And then, on August 28, the CEC met and rejected two of the three! Wow. The CEC has decided that the caning and traffic fines proposals don't meet the requirements of the Referendum Act. The CEC unanimously rejected the caning referendum on the grounds that it requires a change to the legal code and violates the UN's ICCPR and ICESCR (both adopted into Taiwanese law, by the way, by a KMT-run legislature in 2009). "Unanimous" is important there, because three of those seven members (the chairman You didn't vote) were nominated by the KMT and TPP in a deal with the Lai administration back in April. On the other proposal, to allow traffic fines to be reserved for road-related purposes, the committee split 4-3. I'm guessing the four who rejected it were all DPP appointees, and the 3 who supported it were the new commissioners approved by the KMT and TPP.
This is, to my knowledge, the first time the CEC has exercised its discretion to block a referendum question. And it will undoubtedly come up when new CEC commissioners are nominated and the LY is asked to approve them. The CEC needs at least 5 members to meet its quorum, and 8 of 11 seats are filled right now -- but the terms of four will expire in November 2027, right before the 2028 elections. That means unless the LY and EY can agree on at least two new appointees before then, the CEC could be paralyzed (like the Constitutional Court, and the Control Yuan, and the NCC) in the middle of administering the 2028 elections.
I hope I'm wrong about this, but the way the CEC is structured could create a democratic crisis in about a year. The Lai administration's initial nominees were submitted as a package deal along with the KMT and TPP nominees in April, and then the opposition ignored the deal and voted down the DPP's candidates while approving their own. The EY already submitted replacement nominees once, and in July they once again were rejected by the LY majority. The opposition parties could well take an even harder line on replacement nominees as a result of the CEC's actions today. This stalemate HAS to be broken before November 2027...
(5) Taiwan still does not have an absentee, mail-in, or early voting. This puts a disproportionate burden on young people, active-duty military personnel, and anyone else who isn't living at their official household to return there to vote. It's been a long-standing complaint that has never been addressed, even during COVID.
(6) The electoral system is SMD-P for executive races, and SNTV for councils.
For the mayor, township head, and village/ward chief elections, the winner is decided by simple plurality rule. But for council and township and indigenous district representative seats, Taiwan still uses the old single non-transferable vote system (SNTV) in multi-member districts (複數選區). This system has an important implication for partisan competition: the electoral threshold of exclusion is much lower than in the executive races, and small parties can be competitive for a seat by winning 10% of the vote or even less in some districts. That means the usual KMT-DPP duopoly in mayor's races is weakened in local races, and small parties enjoy a more forgiving electoral environment than in elections to the Legislative Yuan.
Traditionally, independent candidates have also fared well in local councilor races. Another truism of Taiwan politics is that the lower down one goes in the hierarchy, the less partisan affiliation matters, so that most village and ward chiefs (~90% in the last election) register as independents.
(7) Gender quotas still apply in the STNV races. Gender quotas have been a part of Taiwan's electoral regime going back to the original ROC constitution, with the quota increasing in the democratic era. Since 1999 it's been a 25% requirement -- i.e. at least one of every four seats in a district must go to a woman. If one of the top four vote-getters is already a woman, nothing changes; if none is, the fourth-place male candidate is displaced by the top female candidate. This rule only kicks in if the district magnitude is at least four, which in practice means it's applied somewhat unevenly across Taiwan's localities. Some counties elect most of their representatives from districts with three seats or fewer; for instance, in Penghu only the Magong City district elects more than four councilors and is therefore covered by the quota. In practice, the actual share of women winning elections to councils is significantly above the 1/4 requirement: in 2014, it was over 30% across all councils, and it's risen from there to about 40% (special municipalities) and 36% (city and county councils), respectively, in 2022.
Importantly, this quota has contributed over the long term to the impressive representation of women at the highest elected offices: over 40 percent in the current legislature. Huang Chang-ling and Nathan Batto both have excellent papers on this topic.
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Counting the votes in Wulai, New Taipei, January 2016.
I'm pretty critical of Taiwan's leadership here: they had more than two years to think about this problem, but they didn't learn from the rest of the world and were woefully underprepared to hold an election during a pandemic. 65k people were denied the right to vote as a result.
That is indefensible. It is long past time for Taiwan to introduce alternative ways to vote for citizens who can't physically access their polling stations. Korea and Japan share similar electoral administrative features, but they are way ahead of Taiwan now.
The rest of this piece appears at Taiwan Insight.
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The TVBS polling website is down to observe the mandatory 10-day polling blackout.
As we wait for the results to roll in, I thought it would be useful to note some of the more distinctive features of Taiwan's system of election management. For readers interested in delving deeper into these issues, I have a working paper on elections in Taiwan that will come out next year in an edited book volume on electoral malpractice and manipulation in Asia. I also did a Twitter thread on the 2020 elections that may be of interest.
Five Unusual Features of Taiwan Elections
The downsides of this system are obvious: it places a disproportionate burden on people who live far from their official place of residence, including college students, active-duty military personnel, and overseas citizens. But there are advantages too: voter registration is automatic, ballot distribution and security is streamlined, and the count can take place at the polling place itself and be wrapped up quickly. (Compare with California, where we are still counting ballots for an election that happened on November 8.)
There are also historical reasons why mail-in and early voting options are viewed with skepticism by Taiwan's two major political parties. In the bad old days of martial law, ballot-stuffing was a serious problem in some races. Public vote counts, official campaign observers, and tight controls on blank ballots were developed to combat fraud, as this excellent book chapter by Su Yen-tu documents.
Unfortunately, with Taiwan still dealing with COVID quarantine restrictions, it appears that about 65,000 eligible voters will be trapped in quarantine and unable to vote. Don't blame the Central Election Commission for this: they're just following the election law, which has no provisions for alternative ways to cast a vote. Instead, blame the CECC, which has kept in place a five-day mandatory quarantine for people testing positive, and the legislature, which would need to amend the election law to allow for either early or absentee voting.
I hope the controversy here starts a more serious discussion about how to add alternative voting methods without undermining the many strengths of Taiwan's electoral process. My own view is that the current system could be adapted to allow early voting much more easily than absentee or mail. For one, early voting wouldn't necessarily require ballot transfers between different precincts, and votes could be kept on-site and counted at the same time as same-day votes. The prospect of absentee voting in Taiwan makes me very nervous: it's much more susceptible to vote-buying, and it also has the potential to completely undermine trust in election outcomes. Imagine, for instance, if a couple hundred thousand ballots cast in mainland China arrived by mail after the election, and swung several critical races toward China-friendly candidates. It would be impossible to persuade most people that those votes were cast freely, without coercion by the CCP...
2. Restrictions on campaign activities. The Civil Servants Elections and Recall Law includes a lot of restrictions on how and where candidates can campaign, what they can pass out, and even when they can officially campaign (only during the 15 days before the election for mayors and county executives, and only five for lower offices!). But in practice, the CEC is only in a position to enforce a few of these, since Taiwan's quite liberal freedom of speech and assembly protections supersede many of these restrictions.
Among the rules that the CEC still strictly enforces are limits on the value of campaign materials passed out to voters (NT$30 per item per person), the time of day campaigns can take place, (7am-10pm), and a blanket ban on campaign activities during Election Day itself, beginning at midnight. Voters cannot wear any kind of clothing with campaign insignias on it to vote, either -- including masks -- and no campaign posters or paraphernalia can be posted within 30 meters of a polling station. Voters cannot use phones or cameras to video during the voting process, either.
The ban on election-day campaigning has been extended to cyberspace as well, and the CEC takes it very seriously. In 2012, for instance, the Ma Ying-jeou Facebook page posted a simple reminder to supporters on Election Day reminding them to turn out to vote for Ma, and the CEC interpreted this as a violation of the campaign prohibition and fined the Ma campaign NT$500,000.
The election law also imposes a polling blackout during the 10 days before the election. You may have noticed all the polls on the TVBS polling site are currently down to comply with this restriction -- they'll be back up as soon as the election results are known.
Finally, if these limits seem intrusive to you, it's worth noting that Taiwan's election restrictions are in practice quite liberal when compared to South Korea, Japan, Singapore, or Malaysia, as this article by Jong-sung You details. Taiwan is a positive outlier in the region on this dimension.
3. Campaign deposits and campaign subsidies. All candidates for elected office have to pay a deposit in order to qualify for the ballot. The CEC has the discretion to set the amount, which varies by prominence of office. For 2022, the deposit requirements for candidates were:
- special municipalities: mayor - NT$1.5 million; city councilor - NT$200,000
- counties and cities: mayor - NT$200,000; councilor - NT$150,000
- township/town/city: head - NT$150,000; representative - NT$120,000
- special municipality indigenous district: head - NT$150,000; representative - NT$50,000
- village/ward chief: NT$50,000
Candidates receive a refund of this deposit only if they obtain more than 1/10 of the winner's vote share, which a lot of minor candidates do not. One of the more curious features of Taiwan elections is just how many fringe or vanity candidates are willing to spend the considerable sums necessary to qualify for the ballot with little hope of actually getting their deposits back.
Taiwan also has public subsidies for both political parties and individual candidates. Political parties get a payout every year in proportion to the share of the party vote they got in the last legislative election. Individual candidates in the local elections receive a subsidy after the election of NT$30 per vote received, but only if they obtain at least 1/3 of the winner's vote share.
These rules appear to me to strike a reasonable balance between allowing access to the ballot for serious candidates, while still discouraging completely frivolous ones. They also include several provisions that increase the value of belonging to a political party, and that tend to privilege the larger, longer-established parties over smaller ones and independent candidates -- all good things for democracy in my view.
4. What if a candidate dies? Article 30 of the Civil Servants Elections and Recall Act specifies that if a candidate dies after the registration deadline, but before Election Day, the election should be stopped and every step in the process redone with a new slate of candidates: announcement of a new Election Day, registration, drawing of ballot numbers, printing of ballots, and so forth. This actually happened in Chiayi City this election cycle: an independent candidate for mayor, Huang Shao-tsung (黃紹聰), was found dead at home, apparently of a heart attack, on November 2.
The CEC has some discretion to decide how to redo the election process, and in the Chiayi City case they decided to postpone Election Day for the mayor's race to December 18. All the rest of the elections in Chiayi City, for councilors and ward chiefs, will still be held on November 26. I'm not sure how common this solution to the death of a candidate is around the world, but it's unheard-of in the US.
5. Poll workers can be nominated by the candidates themselves. A majority of poll workers, including the head manager and supervisor, are required to be civil servants -- many of them schoolteachers. In fact, according to the Elections and Recall Law Article 59, civil servants are required to serve as poll workers if nominated. In addition, political parties and all candidates themselves can nominate some poll workers in each precinct; workers are drawn by lot when the number of nominees exceeds the required number.
This poll worker provision was introduced in the 1960s to act as a check on the ballot stuffing and fraud that frequently occurred then, and it offered candidates a way to monitor each ballot box and increase trust in the vote count. It's generally worked quite well ever since. By far the biggest threat to electoral integrity in Taiwan since the 1980s has been vote-buying, rather than fraud at the ballot box.
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I'll have some more thoughts on the election results and what they mean later this week. For now, I want to revisit what I wrote in advance of the 2018 local elections for Taiwan Insight, with five questions for election night. How did things turn out?
Uh, no. This result was just about the worst of all plausible outcomes for the DPP given the state of the race in the last week. Going in I thought it more likely than not that Lin Chia-lung would come up short in Taichung, but losing 57-43% is on the low end of what was possible. I also expected the DPP's traditional partisan advantage in Kaohsiung to carry Chen Chi-mai through despite the Han Kuo-yu hype, so Han's 54%-45% margin of victory is just incredible. Losing both those races alone probably sealed Tsai Ing-wen's fate as party chairwoman, but then the DPP also lost winnable races in Chiayi City, Taitung, Changhua, and Yunlin, and only won with 38% in Tainan (!!); given the magnitude of the defeat I don't see how she could have stayed on. President Tsai is, indeed, now facing a much more precarious path to reelection in 2020.
2. Can the KMT Finally Get Its Act Together Again?
Close enough. This was, undoubtedly, a great night for the party and a vindication of sorts for chairman Wu Den-yi. The KMT's candidates won in Chiayi City, Hsinchu County, Taitung County, and Kinmen despite the presence of renegade pan-blue candidates, and it pulled off convincing wins in the special municipalities of New Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung. On the down side, in Taipei, Ting Shou-chung didn't do any better against Ko Wen-je than Lien Sheng-wen did in 2014, and he fell just short of winning a three-way race, continuing the KMT's rather surprising recent weakness in the capital city. So Ko will remain in the spotlight and can potentially complicate any KMT challenge for the presidency in 2020 if he decides to run. Also, the jockeying for the KMT's presidential nomination in 2020 just got more complicated: in addition to Wu, Han Kuo-yu's rapid ascent has thrust him into the conversation, and Eric Chu, Wang Jin-pyng, and even former President Ma Ying-jeou kept high profiles during the closing days of the campaign. With Tsai and the DPP looking more vulnerable than most observers expected they would, the value of heading the KMT ticket in 2020 just jumped.
3. How Many Councilor Seats Can Third Parties Win?
Not many. The one small party to have some success in the local council races was the New Power Party (NPP), which won 16 seats around the island and has established itself more firmly than ever as the third party in the party system, after the DPP and KMT. But it fell short of the 20 it was aiming for, and it will still hold less than two percent of all council seats. The other old small parties fared quite a bit worse and appear to be in terminal decline: the PFP managed to win eight seats, the TSU five, and the New Party only two. The much bigger story was the resilience of the KMT in local races: it reversed a long decline in local councils and picked up eight seats this cycle. It will now form a majority in nine councils, including Kaohsiung. Rather than a realignment or breakup of the party system, this election suggests that the DPP-KMT duopoly remains entrenched. Much like in 2014 and 2016, when public opinion swings against the ruling party, the primary opposition rather than third party candidates is the main beneficiary.
4. What Happens if a Referendum Actually Passes?
We're about to find out: seven did, including the two anti-LGBT measures that directly conflict with the Council of Grand Justices ruling in 2017. The only one that will take direct effect is the elimination of the nuclear phase-out amendment to the Electricity Act passed by the DPP in 2016, because it overturns an existing law. All the others will require additional action by the executive or legislature, and it's not clear what will happen if the government doesn't act.
5. Can Taiwan's Election Management System Hold Up under Pressure?
Barely. Despite similar turnout to 2014, there were long lines to vote in many precincts--unusual for Taiwan. The inclusion of 10 referendums really put the Central Election Commission under strain: it had to decide which referendum questions were legal to put on the ballot, to verify signatures, to design procedures for 18-19 year olds to vote (but only for referendums!), and to count an unprecedentedly large number of ballots.
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Both South Korea and Taiwan are considered consolidated democracies, but the two countries have developed very different sets of electoral campaign regulations. While both countries had highly restrictive election laws during their authoritarian eras, they have diverged after democratic transition. South Korea still restricts campaigning activities, including banning door-to-door canvassing, prohibiting pre-official period campaigning, and restricting the quantity and content of literature. Taiwan has removed most campaigning restrictions, except for finance regulations. This study explores the causes of these divergent trajectories through comparative historical process tracing, using both archival and secondary sources.
The preliminary findings suggest that the incumbency advantage and the containment of the leftist or opposition parties were the primary causes of regulation under the soft and hard authoritarian regimes of South Korea and Taiwan. The key difference was that the main opposition party as well as the ruling party in South Korea enjoyed the incumbency advantage but that opposition forces in Taiwan did not. As a result, the opposition in Taiwan fought for liberalization of campaign regulations, but that in South Korea did not. Democratization in Taiwan was accompanied by successive liberalizations in campaign regulation, but in South Korea the incumbent legislators affiliated with the ruling and opposition parties were both interested in limiting campaigning opportunities for electoral challengers.
Dr. Jong-sung You is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University. His research interests include comparative politics and the political economy of inequality, corruption, social trust, and freedom of expression. He conducts both cross-national quantitative studies and qualitative case studies, focusing on Korea and East Asia. He recently published a book entitled Democracy, Inequality and Corruption: Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines Compared with Cambridge University Press. His publications have appeared at American Sociological Review, Political Psychology, Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Asian Perspective, Trends and Prospects, and Korean Journal of International Studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University and taught at UC San Diego. Before pursuing an academic career, he fought for democracy and social justice in South Korea.