Blog - Kharis Templeman (祁凱立)

Published on: August 19, 2026

Taiwan's 2026 Local Elections Preview (3) -- North and Central Taiwan

Keelung 基隆市

KMT: Renominated incumbent mayor Hsieh Kuo-liang (謝國樑)

DPP: Nominated Tung Tzu-wei (童子瑋) on Dec 31, 2025.

Others: TBD

T-PVI: B+6

Notes:

Incumbent Hsieh Kuo-liang easily survived a recall attempt in October 2024: no beat yes, 55-45%, and the yes votes fell about 8k votes short of the 25% threshold. The recall was supposedly organized because Mayor Hsieh had ordered police to break into a retail property whose owners were contesting an order to vacate, before a court had ruled on the dispute. Recall organizers also claimed a larger set of grievances: mismanaged spending, broken campaign promises, opaque no-bid contracts, and new busses breaking down. Hsieh has also had fairly low approval ratings for much of his first term. But apparently not low enough to be recalled...
The Keelung recall vote was a preview of the Great Recall elections of 2025, when all the KMT legislators facing recalls also won. Like in 2025, the signature-gathering drive was launched by a civil society group, and DPP figures including the former DPP mayor Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) and current Taipei mayor nominee Puma Shen joined campaigners on stage to support recalling Hsieh.
Hsieh comes from a prominent and wealthy political family in Keelung. His grandfather (謝清雲) founded the Keelung Second Credit Cooperative in the 1950s, then was a Taiwan Provincial Assembly member and ran in (but lost) the Keelung mayor's race in 1964 -- as a KMT member! -- to an independent candidate. His father Hsieh Hsiu-ping (謝修平) inherited the family business and also served as a Provincial Assembly member before becoming Keelung City Council Speaker and later serving as a National Assembly member from 1991-96. He sought the Keelung mayor's office in 1997 but was forced aside by the party center as it faced a stiff challenge from the DPP.
Hsieh Kuo-liang holds multiple degrees from U.S. universities -- a BA from USC and an MS from MIT -- and speaks excellent English. He also has an LLM from NCCU in Taipei. He eventually followed in the family footsteps and entered politics, winning an LY seat in 2004 on the PFP label, then winning reelection in 2008 and 2012 as the sole legislator from Keelung. He either chose or was forced not to run in 2016 when Hau Lung-pin (郝龍斌) wanted to parachute into what he thought was a safe blue Keelung LY seat (which Hau then lost in an embarrassing upset.) Hsieh ran the family business for a few years before making his comeback in 2022 and is the first of the Hsieh clan to actually become mayor.
Tung Tzu-wei is a two-term Keelung city councilor who was elected council speaker in 2022, when he was only 36 years old. He's also from a political family: his grandfather is Tung Yung (童永), a policy advisor to both Tsai Ing-wen and Lai Ching-te, and President Lai is his father's cousin. Tung was the top vote-getter in his multi-member council district in both 2018 and 2022, so he's got some proven electoral appeal. This is the right kind of candidate profile for the DPP to be competitive in a blue-leaning city like Keelung.

Polls:

7.24-27: A Mirror Media poll finds a close race: Hsieh leads Tung 38.5-36%. Tung leads among respondents under 50.

Rating: leans KMT. Hsieh is an incumbent running for re-election in a blue-leaning city, and that should be enough for him to win. But the recall challenge, his low public approval ratings, and a spirited DPP challenger with local roots suggest this could be competitive. This race is worth keeping an eye on for a DPP upset.

Yilan 宜蘭縣

KMT: Nominated Wu Tsung-hsien (吳宗憲) on May 4 after he won the KMT-TPP polling primary.

DPP: Nominated Lin Kuo-chang (林國漳) on October 25, 2025.

Others: TBD.

T-PVI: G+5

Notes:

Lin is a political newcomer (素人) but also a lawyer who's practiced in Yilan for 30 years, so he has deep local roots (在地深耕). He was personally recruited to run here by President Lai (in his concurrent role as DPP chairman). The DPP has suffered from factional infighting in the two previous election cycles, and that's allowed the KMT's Lin Zi-miao (林姿妙) to prevail twice in a green-leaning county. Lin's nomination here has apparently papered over these differences enough that Yilan DPP office-holders have publicly lined up behind him and he's seen as the clear favorite.
The KMT incumbent Mayor Lin was convicted of corruption charges and sentenced to 12 years imprisonment; she is now suspended and her deputy is running the county. That messed up the KMT's succession plans here: Lin's daughter, Lin Yi-ling, has declined to run as has the county council speaker Chang Sheng-te. The KMT ended up parachuting in (空降) Wu Tsung-hsien (吳宗憲), who has no previous ties to Yilan.
Wu is a former prosecutor with 20 years experience who worked in Taoyuan, Shilin, and Nantou. He joined Hou You-yi's administration in New Taipei in 2020, then in 2024 was placed high enough on the KMT legislative party list to win a seat. He's been in the LY since then.
Wu was able to dodge a bullet when the TPP-KMT joint primary poll put him on top of former TPP legislator and Yilan party chapter head Chen Wan-hui (陳琬惠). She ran a third-party campaign here in 2022, but has agreed to respect the results of the poll and back Wu. This is yet another case where the KMT has ended up a big beneficiary of their pre-electoral coalition deal with the TPP, while the TPP has nothing to show for it.

Polls:

3.16-18. My Formosa with a high-quality poll showing Lin leading Wu 36-33%, before Wu was formally nominated.

Rating: leans DPP. Lin seems to be the right kind of candidate for Yilan: deep local roots, no ties to any of the various DPP groups feuding with each other, and has the backing of the party center. Wu has a clean reputation -- a nice contrast with the last KMT mayor -- but has no local ties and no experience running for office. Absent a major national headwind, Yilan's traditional green lean should be enough for Lin to prevail over a weak opponent.

Hsinchu City 新竹市

IND: Incumbent Mayor Kao Hung-an (高虹安) is now an independent running for reelection; she was a TPP member until she was charged with embezzlement and expelled from the party.

KMT: The KMT decided in December not to field a candidate to challenge Kao.

DPP: Nominated Chuang Ching-cheng (莊競程) on April 15.

Others: Former KMT party spokesman Ho Chih-yung (何志勇) announced on Nov 11, 2025 he would run and has not backed down in the face of KMT pressure.

T-PVI: B+4

Notes:

Kao is really living a charmed political life. First she won her appeal against charges that she had embezzled funds for assistant salaries. The appeals court didn't absolve her of misbehavior but reduced her sentence to a minor violation and a fine, which reinstated her as mayor and made her eligible to run for re-election. Then she avoided a KMT challenger when the party decided to treat her like the TPP member she used to be. Now she's got the tacit support of both pan-blue parties despite being suspended as mayor for much of her first term, and running as an independent for her second.
Forgoing a challenge to Kao in Hsinchu is the single biggest concession the KMT has made to honor their pre-electoral pact with the TPP -- and it's benefitting a candidate who isn't even a TPP member anymore.
Chuang Ching-cheng is a former legislator who served one term representing Taichung's 5th District, from 2020-2024. In what's becoming a bit of a pattern for the DPP, after he lost re-election, he joined the Lai administration, then was nominated for the Hsinchu race. He is a parachute candidate without any obvious connection to Hsinchu. One reason he was nominated appears to be his educational background in biomedical engineering -- perhaps a plus given Hsinchu's highly educated electorate.
Ho's intention to run complicates things for Kao, but he's a long-shot candidate. He's a political science professor (PhD UC Santa Barbara) who previously led the KMT's party cadre training center but has never run for office before. He might pick up some protest votes, but enough to play spoiler? Probably not.

Polls:

1.19. Mirror Media poll shows Kao leading previous DPP mayor Lin Chih-chieh 41-24%.
5.19-20. CNEWS poll finds Kao leading Chuang 55-21% (and didn't ask about Ho).

Rating: leans IND. Kao has somehow stayed quite popular despite being suspended as mayor for 18 months; she's gotten a jump in support from the court reversal in December 2025. Hsinchu also has the most educated and youngest electorate in Taiwan, and Kao's former TPP affiliation and high-tech background make her a better fit here than in most of Taiwan. She's well-positioned to win in the fall, but independents are inherently vulnerable if there are both KMT and DPP candidates running, and Kao has some real political baggage. Prosecutors have also appealed the lower court ruling to the Supreme Court, and Kao could also become ineligible again if it restores the full conviction -- which would blow this race wide open.

Hsinchu County 新竹縣

KMT: Nominated Hsu Hsin-ying (徐欣瑩) on March 28.

DPP: Nominated Jhubei Mayor Cheng Chao-feng (鄭朝方) on June 10.

Others: KMT Deputy Magistrate Chen Chien-hsien (陳見賢) has threatened to run as an independent.

T-PVI: B+11

Notes:

Hsu Hsin-ying has a long history in Hsinchu County and a complicated relationship with the KMT. She left the party in 2015 when it was spiraling in the late Ma Ying-jeou era, and founded the Minkuotang (民國黨) as a kind of "protest" KMT party. She then ran as James Soong's VP candidate in 2016, and ran on the MKT label in the 2018 Hsinchu County election with the support of Ko Wen-je, losing to the current incumbent Yang Wen-ke 38-33%, with DPP nominee Cheng Chao-feng taking 28%. In 2020 she dissolved the MKT and ran as part of a Parliamentary Party Alliance that didn't win any seats. She rejoined the KMT in 2022, then was nominated and elected to the LY in Hsinchu's 1st District in 2024.
The KMT held a primary here to determine the nominee, and Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun put her finger on the scale against Hsu by making the party member vote count for 30% of the final score. That still wasn't enough; Hsu narrowly beat Cheng's preferred candidate, deputy magistrate Chen Chien-hsien (陳見賢). Chen has pointedly not endorsed Hsu and rumors are that he will launch an independent bid, which would split the pan-blue vote.
Cheng Chao-feng is the current mayor of Jhubei, the largest city in the county (37% of the total electorate) and effectively a suburb of high-tech Hsinchu. He won that office with only 40% of the vote in 2022 when KMT, TPP, and independent candidates split the rest. He's also run against Hsu before, in 2018, when both lost to Yang Wen-ke (楊文科).
Hsinchu County is majority Hakka, a demographic group with which the DPP has traditionally been quite weak. Cheng is Hakka and was recruited heavily by the party center, with President Lai personally bestowing his campaign sash on him at the nomination press conference.
The TPP is sitting this one out, and has focused their efforts instead on winning Jhubei; they've nominated Chiu Chen-yuan (邱臣遠), a former TPP legislator and Hsinchu City's deputy mayor (and acting mayor for the 18 months Kao was suspended). The KMT hasn't yielded the nomination there, though, instead putting forward county councilor Wu Hsu-chih (吳旭智). Neither side is backing down and Ko Wen-je has been unusually, publicly vocal about supporting a TPP candidate here. It's a little odd that this township-level race is where the party has decided to take a firm stand against the KMT. If the two parties do both register their own candidates, a significant part of the TPP's future hopes then will rest on Chiu's performance. FWIW, the DPP has nominated Yang-ming Chiao-tung University Professor Tseng Sheng-kai (曾聖凱) for Jhubei mayor.
The incumbent county executive Yang Wen-ke was indicted in July 2024 for accepting bribes in a real estate development in Jhubei. He was acquitted just last month, but several other county government officials were convicted. Prosecutors may appeal. Something to watch given Jhubei's political importance this cycle.

Polls:

2026.1.24-26. Taiwan Power News (?) reports poll with Hsu leading Cheng 39-34%.
2.25-27. TVBS poll (reported in news article but not on polling site) looks at three-way race: finds Chen with 35%, Cheng with 29%, Hsu in 3rd with 22%.
3.4-6. MyFormosa poll finds Hsu leading Cheng 38.5%-32%.

Rating: Leans KMT. A lot depends on whether Chen Chien-hsien follows through with his threat to run as an independent. Cheng is the strongest candidate the DPP could run here, but even so it will take a serious pan-blue split for him to pull off the upset.

Miaoli County 苗栗縣

KMT: Independent mayor Chung Tung-chin (鍾東錦) rejoined the KMT on September 14, 2025, and is running for re-election.

DPP: Nominated Chen Pin-an (陳品安) on November 26, 2025.

Others: TBD

T-PVI: B+12

Notes:

As speaker of the Miaoli County Council, Chung Tung-chin thumbed his nose at KMT party center in 2022, running as a renegade candidate when party chair Eric Chu settled instead on the obscure Hsieh Fu-hung (謝福弘) as the party's nominee. Chung was kicked out of the party but nonetheless won handily in a four-way race with 43%, although the DPP and NPP candidates combined won 45%. The party formally readmitted him in September 2025. As an incumbent KMT mayor he benefits from the party's presumption of renomination and its pact with the TPP; he's likely to have a much easier time of it this election cycle.
The DPP's Chen Pin-an got her start in politics in 2013 by defending protestors in Miaoli who'd tried to stop an onshore wind project by InfraVest, a German wind power company. She then put down roots in Miaoli: she won a county council seat in 2018 as an independent, then joined the DPP and was re-elected in 2022 with the highest vote total in her district.

Polls:

Rating: Likely KMT. With no pan-blue challengers, Chung is well-positioned to win re-election in one of the deepest blue counties in Taiwan. That said, the DPP did well here to recruit Chen, who is a fresh face and has high name recognition and a decent electoral track record in Miaoli. The DPP+NPP combined strength in 2022 is also an intriguing data point. And Chung has a sordid personal history that could again blow up at some point. We'll know more once candidate registration has passed -- another independent candidate entering the race could open a path for an upset.

Nantou County 南投縣

KMT: Renominated incumbent mayor Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華)。

DPP: Nominated Wen Shih-cheng (溫世政), a local dentist.

Others: TBD.

T-PVI: B+5

Notes:

Hsu Shu-hua has already had a long political career. She got her start in politics by being elected to the Nantou County Council as a PFP member way back in 2002, when she was only 27. She joined the KMT and won the Nantou City mayor's race in 2005, serving two terms, then won an LY by-election (for Nantou 2, the bluer of Nantou's two LY districts) in 2015 and was re-elected twice (with 57% and 55% of the vote) in tough years for the KMT. She was a KMT Central Standing Committee member and served as spokesperson for Han Kuo-yu's 2018 Kaohsiung mayoral campaign. In 2022, she won the Nantou magistrate race 56-44%, becoming Nantou's first-ever female magistrate. Moreover, her satisfaction ratings have improved significantly over her first term. As an incumbent in a blue-leading county with a long history of native-son/daughter voting patterns, she's going to be hard to beat.
That said, she does have some controversies in her recent past. During the 2022 campaign she was accused of plagiarizing her master's thesis; Feng Chia University ultimately accepted her revised thesis and let her keep the degree. In addition, her father, Hsu Tien-sung (許天送), who is a former two-term Nantou City representative council chair, is a former convict, which DPP challenger Frida Tsai Pei-hui (蔡培慧) raised as an attack line in their race in 2022; Hsu defended her father as having "already paid his debt to society." More recently, in 2024, her administration's plan to site a waste incinerator in Mingjian Township sparked organized local opposition and protester clashes during 2026 environmental review hearings.
Wen Shih-cheng is a native (prodigal?) son who has been away for a long time: he grew up in Caotun but went to high school in Taichung, went to Taipei Medical University's dentistry program, and built a successful and famous dental implant practice in New Taipei. He hasn't lived in Nantou since, or been involved in electoral politics before.
The DPP's efforts to recruit a more experienced candidate here struck out: their top choices were at-large legislator Lo Mei-ling (羅美玲 - a naturalized citizen born in Malaysia who served in the Nantou County council) and Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Lin Ching-yi (林靜儀), who both declined.

Polls:

TBD.

Rating: Safe KMT. Of all the KMT-run localities, this one seems the hardest in which to imagine an upset. It's got a popular incumbent mayor running for re-election in a blue-leaning area, facing a complete political novice who hasn't lived in the county for decades, with no third-party challengers or intra-party splits on the horizon.

Changhua County 彰化縣

KMT: Nominated Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) on May 13, 2026.

DPP: Nominated Chen Su-yueh (陳素月) in December 2025 via internal poll.

Others: Former DPP mayor Chiu Chien-fu (邱建富); TPP's Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如); KMT legislator Hsieh Yi-feng (謝衣鳯) has threatened to run as an independent.

T-PVI: B+1

Notes:

It seems like there's always at least one race that goes haywire for both major parties in each election cycle. In 2022 that was Miaoli. In 2026, it's Changhua. Both parties are dealing with disgruntled primary losers who threaten to split the vote, and there's still the threat of a renegade campaign by a TPP-linked candidate, too.
Chen Su-yueh is the sitting legislator from Changhua's 4th District, a seat she's held since winning a by-election in 2015. Before that she was a Changhua County Councilor for two terms (2006-14). Her vote totals as a legislator: 2016 - 57% (DPP Pr 57%); 2020 - 53% (DPP Pr 57%), 2024 - 52% (DPP Pr 39%).
Chiu Chien-fu is a 39-year DPP member and two-term mayor of Changhua City -- the largest in the county -- who was passed over for the nomination. He quit the party in June and announced a run as an independent.
Wei Ping-cheng is a lawyer from a well-known Shetou-area silk-stocking manufacturing family who was nominated by party chair Cheng Li-wun on May 13, 2026. He has no previous electoral experience.
The party passed over sitting Legislator Hsieh Yi-feng from Changhua's 3rd District, who had stronger polling numbers but was blocked for "family reasons," per KMT party center.
The TPP's Tsai Pi-ru declared for the race shortly after Wei was nominated, arguing that she would be the stronger candidate for the pan-blue side. But on June 3, the TPP election committee decided not to nominate a candidate in Changhua, and Tsai publicly dropped her bid but still didn't rule out a possible run.
Incumbent KMT magistrate Wang Huei-mei (王惠美) twice won easily here but is term-limited out, meaning this is another open-seat race where the KMT is playing defense. Wang has also been noticeably absent from Wei's campaign events so far.

Polls:

5.20-21. CNEWS poll looks at Chen, Wei, and Tsai; Chen in lead with 30%, Wei at 14%, Tsai at 8.5%.
8.10-17. ETToday poll finds Chen way ahead of Wei, 36-19%, with Chiu getting 12%.

Rating: Leans DPP. Changhua is as close to an evenly-balanced county as there is in Taiwan -- only one point bluer than the national average. Thanks to Wang Huei-mei's popularity, the KMT has held the county government without trouble for eight years, but they've nominated a weak candidate in Wei who doesn't appear to have the support of other local powerbrokers. Chen Su-yueh is vulnerable given the renegade DPP candidate, but Wei is going to struggle to unify the pan-blue vote behind him, as the latest polls show. If Hsieh or Tsai run that would make things even worse for the KMT. It would probably take a late switch in KMT candidate to make this competitive.

Published on: June 9, 2025

The Curious Case of the Taiwan People's Party, Part 1: Policy, Office, or Votes?

This post got so long I broke it into [two] --> [three] --> FOUR pieces. Part 1 is below. Part 2 is here, Part 3 is here, and Part 4 is here.

For the past 18 months, the biggest puzzle in Taiwan politics has been the curious behavior of the Taiwan People's Party (TPP). In the 2024 elections, the TPP did very well for a third party, winning 22 percent of the party list vote and eight seats -- enough to break through the DPP-KMT duopoly to deny either of the two major parties a majority for the first time since the Chen Shui-bian era. That made it the kingmaker in the Legislative Yuan and gave it significant bargaining power over the other two parties in this term -- if they were able to exploit it.

The puzzle is that the TPP does not appear to have maximized its leverage in the current legislature. The party's leaders turned down opportunities to grab the speaker or deputy speaker positions or to negotiate for cabinet positions in a Lai government, and over the last year they have instead prioritized opposition to the DPP administration rather than conditional cooperation with the ruling party. More surprising still, they have publicly aligned themselves with the KMT on many of that party's most controversial policy initiatives -- even when those policies are broadly unpopular.

This transformation of the TPP in the public eye from a centrist swing party to a "pan-blue subsidiary" has generated a widespread sense of angst and betrayal among pan-green commentators, who have accused the TPP of "subordinat[ing] itself blindly" and "march[ing] in lockstep with the KMT," and even tacitly cooperating with the CCP to oppose the DPP and the Lai administration. The TPP's public image has shifted so dramatically that many observers of Taiwan politics now simply assert that the legislature is "KMT-controlled."

The problem with this assertion is that it's wrong. The TPP legislative caucus is not actually marching in lockstep with the KMT on every issue, as I'll argue in what follows. On the contrary, it holds preferences that are quite distinct from the KMT, it has acted as a significant check on that party's legislative caucus, and its public cooperation with the KMT against the ruling DPP will be temporary and limited, rather than comprehensive and indefinite. But for their own reasons, neither the KMT nor the TPP want to advertise this fact. For the moment, they both would rather have everyone believe they are a unified pan-blue team cooperating to stop DPP overreach.

No other explanation is consistent with the political outcomes of the last 18 months.

Published on: August 12, 2022

Previewing Taiwan's 2022 Local Elections (II): North and Central Taiwan

This is Part II of the 2022 local elections overview. For coverage of special municipalities, see Part I. For the South, East, and Offshore Islands, see Part III. For concluding thoughts, see Part IV.

Keelung City - 基隆市

KMT: Nominated former legislator Hsieh Kuo-liang (謝國樑) on May 26.
DPP: Nominated legislator Tsai Shih-ying (蔡適應) on July 22.
Others: The NPP has nominated a candidate for mayor here, city councilor Chen Wei-chung (陳薇仲). Independent candidate Huang Hsi-hsien (黃希賢) left the KMT in 2021. One other political novice registered -- a poet named Tseng Kuo-min (曾國民).
T-PVI: B+7
Notes:

This is one of the more interesting races in this cycle. Both major party candidates have held the Keelung legislative seat: Hsieh from 2008-2016, and Tsai from 2016-present.
Keelung used to be reliably blue until 2016, when Tsai won the LY seat here in a major upset. He beat former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin, who parachuted in (and shoved aside Hsieh) because he thought it would be a relatively easy seat to win. Oops.
Keelung has had a DPP mayor for the last eight years, but it still leans blue, and the presence of an NPP candidate will probably hurt Tsai more.
Conversely, the KMT has suffered some really damaging intra-party splits here in the recent past, and Huang could steal some votes from Hsieh. Huang was a leading supporter of Han Kuo-yu in the 2020 presidential campaign, but has more recently also welcomed support from other parties and sought to position himself as part of a "Third Force" in Keelung.
Update 9.26: Popular incumbent DPP mayor Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) is taking a prominent role in Tsai Shih-ying's campaign to be his successor.

Polls:

2022.10.5-7: Hey, somebody finally polled Keelung! And it's TISR! Excellent. There's a lot to learn from this one. Headline number is Hsieh narrowly leading Tsai, 31-28%. The NPP's Chen Wei-chung is pulling 5%, with former KMT member Huang Hsi-hsien getting only 1%. Hsieh is getting about 80% of KMT supporters, and Huang only 3%. Among DPP partisans, Tsai is getting only 71%, Hsieh has 8% (!), and the NPP's Chen has 4%. Both camps are split here, but Hsieh appears to be doing better holding on to pan-blue voters than Tsai is pan-green. That might make the difference. I'm surprised the KMT renegade candidate Huang isn't registering any support in this poll.

Rating: Leans KMT. On paper this looks like an even matchup, with both Tsai and Hsieh previously representing the city in the legislature, both moderates, and both relatively young (Tsai is 49, Hsieh is 46). Tsai won the LY seat here twice, but with only 41% in 2016 and 47% in 2020, when the DPP did very well nationally. With an NPP candidate in the race likely to pull some support away from the DPP, Tsai starts this campaign as the underdog.

Result: KMT gain. Hsieh Kuo-liang wins, 52.9-39.0%.

Yilan County - 宜蘭縣

KMT: Renominated incumbent county executive Lin Zi-miao (林姿妙).
DPP: Nominated Yilan City mayor Chiang Tsung-yuan (江聰淵).
Others: The TPP has nominated party caucus director Chen Wan-hui (陳琬惠) here. Update 9.2: Three others.
T-PVI: G+6
Notes:

Yilan has traditionally been a DPP stronghold, and winning this office launched the political careers of prominent DPP leaders Chen Ding-nan (Minister of Justice during the Chen Shui-bian era) and You Si-kun (the current Speaker of the Legislative Yuan). Before Lin, the only KMT member to win here in the democratic era was Lu Kuo-hua (呂國華) in 2005. But the DPP entered the 2018 campaign divided: the party's nominee, Chen Ou-po (陳歐珀), was picked over the acting DPP magistrate, Chen Chin-te (陳金德), who himself was at odds with his DPP predecessor Lin Tsung-hsien (林聰賢), who had left to lead the Council of Agriculture. Chen Ou-pu never managed to unify the DPP base behind his candidacy, and Lin Zi-miao was the beneficiary.
In January 2022, prosecutors announced that Lin was under investigation for bribe-taking and other political corruption dating to her time as Luodong Township mayor. The KMT tried to paint these accusations as politically motivated, and Lin remains in the race.
Chiang Tsung-yuan is the two-term mayor of Yilan City, the county's most populous jurisdiction.
Chen was ranked 9th on the TPP's party list in 2020, not high enough to enter the legislature.
Update 8.24: Lin Zi-miao, her daughter, 10 other county officials, and five other people have been formally indicted by Yilan County prosecutor's office for corruption, forgery, and money laundering. Lin is accused of accepting illegal payments when she was head of Luodong Township, and later as Yilan mayor helping to cover up illegal conversion of agricultural land to urban use. She says the charges are politically motivated and remains in the race.

Polls:

2022.10.11-15: RWNews online poll is rather surprising, given Lin's corruption charges: she is still comfortably ahead of Chiang, 53-31%, with the TPP's Chen at 5.5%. Yeesh. What a bad result for the DPP here.
2022.10.19-21: Liberty Times with an in-house poll of this race, which finds a much closer race: Lin in the lead with 37% to Chiang's 30%, with the TPP's Chen at 4%. But Lin is still ahead even in this poll from an outfit with a strong green house effect. Not looking great for the DPP here a month out.

Rating: Leans DPP. The DPP campaign here in 2018 was dragged down by infighting, and as a result the party lost an office they've held for most of the democratic era. With the KMT incumbent Lin wounded by corruption charges, and the long-time mayor of the largest city in the county challenging her, the DPP has a good opportunity to return this office to the green camp -- that is, if they've resolved whatever factional battles doomed them last time.
Update 10.26: Leans KMT. Recent polling indicates Lin is holding on despite the corruption charges, and Chiang hasn't made much progress here. I have no local knowledge about what is going on in this race, but if Chiang was going to consolidate the green camp behind him it should have happened by now. Two polls from very different outlets using different methods both find him stuck in the low 30s -- in Yilan! Lin Zi-miao is enjoying the advantages of incumbency, I guess? Rating change to Leans KMT.

Result: KMT hold. Lin Zi-miao wins 50.8-41.1%.

Hsinchu City - 新竹市

KMT: Nominated 6-term city councilor Lin Geng-ren (林耕仁) on June 22.
DPP: Nominated deputy mayor Shen Hui-hung (沈慧虹), also on June 22.
Others: The TPP has nominated party-list legislator Kao Hung-an 高虹安. The NPP may also field a candidate here. Update 9.2: In the end, the NPP did not endorse a candidate; 3 independents registered.
T-PVI: B+3
Notes:

Incumbent mayor Lin Chih-chien was term-limited out. He resigned as mayor to take up the DPP's nomination for Taoyuan, then had to withdraw from that race on August 12.
Shen is a career civil servant who joined the DPP only in June. She spent her career in the Taipei city government, working on transportation issues under both DPP (Chen Shui-bian) and KMT (Ma Ying-jeou and Hau Lung-bin) mayors. Lin Chih-chien appointed her head of the transportation department in Hsinchu in 2014, and deputy mayor in 2016.
Both the NPP and TPP could play spoiler roles here; many Hsinchu voters have been willing to support third-party candidates in recent years. In 2016, the NPP fielded a candidate against the DPP's caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) in violation of its pre-electoral pact (Ker squeezed out a win anyway), and in 2020, the KMT candidate Cheng Cheng-ling (鄭正鈴) won here with only 37% of the vote when the DPP and NPP candidates split the rest.
The TPP's Kao is a party-list legislator without much of a public profile before 2020, but she's got a background that matches Hsinchu's high-tech aspirations: a PhD in mechanical engineering from an American university, and several years experience working at Foxconn (鴻海) as an aide to Terry Gou. This will be a test of whether the TPP can cultivate candidates who will emerge out of the shadow of Ko Wen-je and be competitive in local races.
Update 10.26. The plagiarism accusations flying around in what seems like every race in Taiwan have now been hurled at both Kao and Lin as well. Kao seems more vulnerable because her campaign appeal is based in part on having an engineering PhD from an American university; the criticism is that she used materials from previous papers and a report she was lead author on in her dissertation without proper attribution. Now the institute she worked for, the government-funded Institute for Information Industry, is suing her for improperly using their copyrighted materials in her dissertation. To my eyes this might be sloppy but it's not in the same category as copying someone else's work to get an MA degree, and it looks like a partisan hit job.

Polls:

2022.7.15-22: An early TVBS poll here finds a very close three-way race, with Lin at 27%, Kao at 26% (!), and Shen at 23%. That suggests Kao is a viable candidate here, and strategic voting might actually lead some green-leaning voters to abandon the DPP's Shen instead.
2022.10.4-8: RWNews online poll shows a rather shocking turn here: Kao leads the race with 37%, with Shen at 30%, and Lin at 25%.
2022.10.19-24: ETToday poll reports similars results as RWNews: Kao leads the race with 38%, to Shen's 32% and Lin way in back with 18%. If these latest polls are at all accurate, strategic voting appears more likely to hurt Lin than Shen. At the least it's clear Kao has a real shot to win, which is probably why the plagiarism attacks on her are so vicious.
2022.10.21-26: TVBS polls Hsinchu again, finds Kao Hung-an in the lead with 34% to Shen Hui-hung's 27% and Lin Geng-ren at 21%. If even TVBS with its strong blue house effect finds the KMT nominee Lin in 3rd place, then he's really in trouble. But it looks like Kao rather than Shen is the primary beneficiary. I tend to be skeptical of polls that show third-party candidates doing this well, since voters have a tendency to drift back toward their partisan leanings as Election Day approaches. We'll see if Kao can maintain her lead for the next month.

Rating: Leans KMT. Hsinchu used to be reliably blue but has trended toward the DPP since 2014: Tsai Ing-wen won a majority here in both 2016 and 2020, and Ker Chien-ming, the DPP's party caucus whip, held this seat from 2016-2020. Shen, however, is not a high-profile candidate and has never run for office before. The KMT used internal polls to decide on Lin, who has been a Hsinchu councilor since 1998.
Update 10.26: Toss-Up. Kao is clearly competitive here, and her candidacy seems to be pulling more support from the blue than green camp. Still a month to go, but this race could break toward any of the three main candidates now. It's certainly not looking great for Lin and the KMT...Rating change to Toss-Up.

Result: TPP gain. Kao Hung-an wins 45.0-35.7%.

Hsinchu County - 新竹縣

KMT: Renominated incumbent Yang Wen-ke (楊文科).
DPP: Nominated Chou Chiang-chieh (周江杰) on August 8.
Others: Chubei mayor Ho Kan-ming (何淦銘) declared his own candidacy in June and tried without success to convince the DPP to back him. Update 9.23: Ho pulled out of the race at the last moment; 3 other independents registered.
T-PVI: B+12
Notes:

Yang held off a stiff challenge here in 2018 from another pan-blue candidate, Hsu Hsin-ying (徐欣瑩) of the Minkuotang (民國黨). Despite the pan-blue split, the DPP couldn't steal this one; Yang won 38% of the vote to Hsu's 32% and DPP candidate Cheng Chao-fang's (鄭朝方) 28%.
Chou was a county councilor for one term (2014-17) as a Taiwan Green Party member, then was recruited into the DPP to lead the party's Hakka Affairs Department. His recent career illustrates the DPP's willingness to co-opt energetic "third force" activists into the party; other examples include Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) and Fan Yun (范雲).
Ho is an independent who has cooperated with the DPP in the past, winning the Chubei mayor's race twice with backing from the party. This time around, the DPP's central nomination committee made a decision here to nominate one of their own rather than support an independent challenge to Yang; that decision probably assures Yang of victory.
Update 9.23. I missed earlier that Ho announced he would not run on the day of the Sept 2 registration deadline. He also declined to endorse the DPP candidate Chou here, and instead pledged to work to elect Kuo Han-chang (郭漢章) as his successor in Chubei. That makes the county race close to a straight-up green-blue two-way contest now. None of the other three candidates have much of a public profile.

Polls:

2022.10.4-8: RWNews online poll finds Yang leading Chou, 45-30%. Some weakness in that number for Yang (an incumbent under 50% is usually a warning sign), but he's still way ahead.

Rating: Likely KMT. The DPP is so weak in Hsinchu County, the question is usually not whether the DPP candidates will win (they won't), but whether they will run at all. An independent with DPP backing could give the official KMT nominee a competitive race, as happened in both 2014 and 2018.
Update 9.23: Safe KMT. With Ho not running and no other prominent pan-blue candidates registering, this race is now effectively a one-on-one contest between a KMT incumbent facing a young, untested DPP nominee in a deep blue county. There's a plausible scenario in which Yang could have lost this election, but this is not it. Rating change to Safe KMT.

Result: KMT hold. Yang Ke-wen wins 63.4-32.4%.

Miaoli County - 苗栗縣

KMT: Initially announced Legislator Hsu Chih-jung (徐志榮) as the nominee on May 14. But Hsu didn't want to run, and on June 29 he was replaced by Hsieh Fu-hung (謝福弘).
DPP: Nominated Hsu Ting-chen (徐定禎) on April 27.
Others: KMT member Chung Tung-chin (鐘東錦) declared he would defy the party leadership and run as an independent shortly after Hsieh's nomination was announced. The NPP has also nominated a candidate here, Song Kuo-ting (宋國鼎). One other independent candidate.
T-PVI: B+11
Notes:

Hsieh's entire career has been in the Irrigation Association of Miaoli County. He lost his position at the head of that organization after the DPP passed a bill in 2020 turning all association positions into appointed positions rather than elected ones.
Chung Tung-chin is the Miaoli County Council Speaker, and he has a colorful past.
The DPP's nominee Hsu is the former mayor of Toufen, a moderate-sized town.
The NPP tried to get the DPP to forego nominating a candidate here and instead to back their own member, Song Kuo-ting, the party's only county councilor. The DPP refused, and now there's a four-way race.
Update 9.8. The KMT has now expelled Chung Tung-chin from the party. Hsieh Fu-hung is gamely trying to rally the KMT base back behind his candidacy.

Polls:

2022.7.5-9: A very early online poll from RWNews found Chung leading the pack, with 38% to the DPP's Hsu with 19%, the NPP's Song with 16%, and Hsieh in a weak 4th place with 12%.
2022.10.26: For a race that's so colorful it's frustrating there still do not seem to be any good recent polls of Miaoli. So I'm going to mention the results of a poll from something called the Asia Pacific Elite Exchange Association (?) here, which got a writeup in Newtalk news. They show a four way race, with KMT renegade Chung at 22%, the DPP's nominee Hsu at 21%, the NPP's Song at 11.5%, and the KMT nominee Hsieh all the way down at 7%. That seems improbably low for a KMT candidate in Miaoli. But, combined with lots of political reporting suggesting Hsieh is a really weak candidate, that's enough to change this to a toss-up.

Rating: Leans KMT. Heavily Hakka, this is one of the bluest counties in mainland Taiwan and should be an easy hold for the KMT. But not this time: the party's nomination strategy here really blew up in their faces with Hsu's public refusal and the challenge from Chung, and local media are calling this a "train wreck" for the KMT. The DPP-NPP rivalry may be a lower-profile problem but it also probably dooms either candidate's chances. As the renegade KMT candidate in a four-way race, Chung has a decent shot.
Update 10.26: Toss-up. The renegade candidate Chung still seems to be a serious threat to win this. In the absence of good polling data and with all four candidates apparently still viable, rating change to Toss-Up.

Result: Independent (KMT renegade) gain. Chung wins 42.7%-31.2%.

Nantou County - 南投縣

KMT: Nominated legislator Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華) on May 26. (Not to be confused with Taipei City DPP councilor Hsu Shu-hua (also written 許淑華 in Chinese.))
DPP: Nominated former party-list legislator Frida Tsai (蔡培慧) on March 29.
Others: One independent, county councilor Wang Yung-ching (王永慶).
T-PVI: B+5
Notes:

KMT incumbent Lin Ming-chen (林明溱) is term-limited out, so this is an open-seat race.
Hsu has racked up impressive wins in Nantou 2, which at the presidential level is competitive and the "greener" of Nantou's two LY districts -- Tsai Ing-wen carried it in both 2016 and 2020, while Hsu won 57-43% in 2016 and 55-41% in 2020. Before winning a legislative by-election in 2015, Hsu was the mayor of Nantou City (2006-2014), and before that a county councilor (2002-2006).
Frida Tsai is a leader of the Taiwan Rural Front (台灣農村陣線), an NGO working to prevent agricultural land expropriation. She's one of several candidates with a social activist background who Tsai Ing-wen placed on the DPP's party list in 2016, and she subsequently served a term in the LY. In 2020, she ran against Ma Wen-chun in Nantou 1, losing 53.6-46.4%.
Tsai was raised in Nantou but moved to Taipei as a teenager, then earned a Ph.D. from NTU in bio-industrial communication.
Update 8.15. Hsu has submitted a request to Feng-chia University to have her own MA thesis examined for plagiarism; result will be known in October. She appears to be worried about attacks like those that forced Lin Chih-chien out of the Taoyuan race.
Update 10.26. Frida Tsai has accused the incumbent county executive Lin Ming-chen of vote-buying, in the form of passing out noodle bowls during his "farewell tour." Lin is openly campaigning for Hsu.
Update 11.3. At a campaign rally, Tsai Ing-wen explicitly accuses Hsu Shu-hua of being "involved with powerful local gangsters" and coming from a political family with a history of "black gold" politics. Hsu was accused in 2012 of paying ward chiefs in Nantou to buy votes, but was never charged. The DPP appears to be focusing more on the political corruption angle in recent days as their candidates have struggled to gain traction against KMT incumbents. In some ways this election cycle feels like a throwback to the 1990s.

Rating: likely KMT. Hsu is a formidable candidate; given her past experience and her performance in recent LY elections, she looks hard to beat here unless (and maybe even if) the plagiarism rumors are confirmed. Nantou also has tended to exhibit a strong "native son/daughter" tendency in voting patterns, and Hsu's clearly got the edge over Tsai there as well.

Result: KMT hold. Hsu Shu-hua wins, 56.0-42.8%.

Changhua County - 彰化縣

KMT: Renominated incumbent Wang Huei-mei (王惠美).
DPP: Nominated legislator legislator Huang Shiou-fang (黃秀芳) on June 28.
Others: One minor candidate.
T-PVI: Even
Notes:

Wang was a two-term legislator representing Changhua 1 when she ran for magistrate in 2018, and she crushed the DPP incumbent Wei Ming-ku (魏明谷) 53-40%. Before that, she demonstrated some real political talent and resilience in pulling out a victory in a three-way race in 2012 over two candidates from powerful political families in the county, Chen Chin-ting (陳進丁) and Lin Yi-pang (林益邦). She got her start in politics as mayor of Lukang, an old port town that's now a popular tourist attraction.
Huang is no slouch herself, winning close races in Changhua 2 in 2016 and 2020. But she's spent less time holding office in the county than Wang.
Much like Taichung, Changhua County is a swing region at the presidential level, but factional politics and political dynasties also run deep here. Wang's approval ratings put her in the middle of the pack among mayors and county executives.

Polls:

2022.9.20-24: RWNews with an online poll that finds Wang way ahead of Huang, 55% to 29%. Likely to tighten somewhat but Wang looks in good shape here so far.

Rating: Leans KMT. As in 2018, KMT appears to be united behind Wang's candidacy, and there are no prominent independents in the race, so this is an even-strength contest. Like Taichung, my prior here is that the incumbent starts with an advantage, but the national political environment may be decisive: if it's neutral or worse for the DPP, then Wang wins. If it instead turns out to be a green year, Huang is a strong enough candidate to pull off the upset.

Result: KMT hold. Wang Hui-mei wins, 56.8-41.9%.

Part III covers the south, east coast, and offshore islands. See also Part I. Part IV.

Published on: August 10, 2022

Taiwan's 2022 Local Elections: Previewing the Campaign (I)

Taiwan's local elections will be held this year on Saturday, November 26, the date set by the Central Election Commission. Altogether, nine different types of offices are up for election:

(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).

Since 2014, these elections have all been held concurrently on a four-year cycle. The local elections in 2022 are the only island-wide ones to be held between the 2020 and 2024 general elections for president and the legislature. That makes these something like midterm elections in the United States: in addition to deciding who governs across all of Taiwan's localities, they also are an important bellwether for trends in party politics. In 2014, the DPP flipped seven of the county and city executives, providing the first concrete indication that it could surpass the KMT and sweep to victory in 2016. In 2018, the KMT returned the favor, flipping nine local mayors including an astonishing upset victory by Han Kuo-yu in Kaohsiung; Han's victory set off a politically volatile period in Taiwan politics that concluded only with Tsai Ing-wen's equally astonishing comeback and emphatic reelection in January 2020.

In an important shift, this time around both major parties have mostly done away with the party member votes and polling primaries that they had used over the past several election cycles to choose their nominees for city and county executives. Instead, the party chair --Tsai Ing-wen for the DPP, Eric Chu for the KMT -- is playing a decisive role in "negotiating" the nominees in each locality. (As this post from Nathan Batto details, both major parties have become more skeptical about the value of using polls to decide nominees after the 2020 election cycle.) The DPP has had considerable success using this method of negotiation in the past, but the KMT has typically struggled to work out side deals in the same way and suffered lots of intra-party splits as a result. A key concern for both, then, will be keeping disgruntled party members who were denied a nomination from running anyway as independents, or not campaigning to elect the party's official candidates.

Now that the candidates for most of these races have been chosen, I am going to keep notes here on the nominees for each executive race, along with whatever other tidbits might be relevant, and try to give some context for what to expect. To keep this manageable, I've broken this discussion into three parts. Today's post has an overview of the highest-profile races in the six special municipalities (直轄市): Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung. Later I'll break down the county-level executive races in north and central Taiwan, and then follow with the south, east, and offshore islands.

Update 8.27. I've added in a rough estimate of the partisan leaning of each locality. Following the Partisan Voting Index (PVI) developed by the Cook Political Report for elections in the United States, I've called this the Taiwan Partisan Voting Index (T-PVI). To calculate T-PVI, I averaged the DPP presidential vote share in each jurisdiction over the last two presidential elections (in 2016 and 2020), then took the difference between the national and local vote share. B+1 means the city or county is one point bluer (i.e. less favorable to the DPP) than the national electorate. G+1 means it is one point greener (more favorable to the DPP.) By this measure, the "bluest" locality in Taiwan is Lienchiang County, at B+38, and the "greenest" is Tainan at G+11. Of Taiwan's 22 localities, 14 are bluer than average, 7 are greener, and one (Changhua County) is even. So, in a national political environment where the blue and green camps are running even, the blue side should be favored to win 14 localities to the green side's 7.

Update 9.20. The latest TFOP poll shows Tsai Ing-wen's approval rating dropping to 43.8% in September, the lowest monthly rating since June 2021, and near the lowest point of her second term. The national environment for the DPP doesn't look as favorable as it did two months ago.

Update 10.26. October TFOP poll is out and shows Tsai Ing-wen's approval rating bouncing back up to 51.2%, and generic identification with the DPP jumping up from 22.4% to 33.5%. That increase might (?) be related to the attention on the CCP 20th Party Congress, where Xi Jinping secured a third term as party secretary and stacked the Standing Committee of the Politburo with his own loyalists. Regardless, that's a big improvement for the DPP in the last month before the elections.

Taipei - 台北市

KMT: Nominated Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) on May 25.
DPP: Nominated Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) on July 10.
Others: Deputy mayor Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊) declared as an independent candidate on August 28. Former Tainan County magistrate Su Huan-chih (蘇煥) announced on July 29 he's running as an independent. 8 others also registered by the September 2 deadline.
T-PVI: B+2
Notes:

Chiang is a 2nd-term legislator representing Taipei 3, and the son of John Chang --> Chiang (章孝嚴 --> 蔣孝嚴), who has claimed to be an illegitimate child of Chiang Ching-kuo and in the 2000s changed the family name to make the claim explicit. Chiang Wan-an is 43 -- young by KMT standards -- and, given his father's long career in KMT politics and ostensible connection to CCK, is KMT royalty. His father held the same district from 2008-2012.
Chiang has twice won tough races for the legislature in Taipei 3, 47-38-12% in 2016, and 51-46% in 2020, while running well ahead of the KMT presidential ticket; Tsai Ing-wen carried the district with 52% of the vote in 2016, and 53.4% in 2020.
Chen headed the Ministry of Health and Welfare and also the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) during the pandemic. He became a household name through daily press conferences leading Taiwan's COVID response, but he has never before run for elected office.
Incumbent Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) is term-limited out. Ko won this race in 2014 with the DPP's backing. In 2018, he barely won a three-way contest by less than 4000 votes when the DPP instead nominated its own candidate, Yao Wen-chih (姚文智).
Ko appears to want his deputy mayor Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊) to run as a candidate of the TPP. She has publicly expressed interest in running, although she hasn't joined the party (she's still a PFP member) and hasn't yet announced.
Su Huan-chih (蘇煥智), who was the DPP magistrate of Tainan County from 2001-2010, has also registered to run. He ran for party chair in 2012, losing to Su Tseng-chang. Since then he's been marginalized within the party and has become a critic of Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP leadership. He left the party and ran for mayor in Tainan in 2018 as an independent, but won only 4.1% of the vote there.
Update 8.28: Huang Shan-shan has officially declared she's in the race. Taiwan media are now calling this a "tripod" (三腳督) election.
Update 9.15: Su Huan-chih complains that TV networks are focusing on only the top three candidates and ignoring his campaign. He says he will sue the National Communications Commission for not forcing news media to cover the candidates "fairly," citing Articles 49 and 104 of the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act. The NCC (rightly in my view) responds by saying they're not going to dictate how networks should cover the campaigns. For background on the NCC, see here. For more on the regulation of elections in Taiwan, see this working paper.

Polls:

2022.6.24: TVBS poll of Taipei mayor options. Data here show Huang Shan-shan pulling more support from the pan-green than pan-blue camp: only 62% of DPP partisans favor Chen Shih-chung and 22% favor Huang Shan-shan, while 86% of KMT partisans favor Chiang Wan-an and only 9% favor Huang. For NPP partisans (only 3% of sample), 39% favor Huang, 28% favor Chen, and 27% favor Chiang.
2022.8.22-26: TVBS poll taken just before Huang Shan-shan enters the race. Chiang Wan-an leads with 36%, Huang (!) is second with 26%, and Chen is third at 23%. The poll also finds ~50% of respondents have a favorable impression of Chiang and Huang, with Chen well back at only 29%, and 52% unfavorable.
2022.8.31-9.3: Liberty Times poll taken just after Huang enters the race. Good illustration of "house effects" here: LTN is a green paper, and their poll shows Chen leading Chiang and Huang, 30-23-21%, in contrast to TVBS's much "bluer" results. Unfortunate that LTN, unlike TVBS, does not put up the full read-out of questions and methodology. I'll note the result here since it's a paper of record, but caveat emptor...
2022.9.13-17: RWNews online poll shows a virtual tie, with Chiang at 35.2%, Chen at 35.0%, and Huang at 24.8%.
2022.9.29-30: TVBS poll finds Chiang still in lead: 40% to Chen's 22%, and Huang's 23%. Notable that Huang is not only viable but also potentially ahead of Chen. The partisan breakdown in this poll shows Huang still pulling about 20% of DPP and 42% of NPP, but only 7% of KMT partisans. Chiang appears to be keeping KMT voters firmly behind him.
2022.10.4-5: ETToday poll finds Chiang in lead, 40% to Chen's 27%, with Huang slightly back at 23%. Given polling margin of error, this is entirely consistent with the earlier TVBS polls of the race.
2022.10.5-6: My-Formosa poll finds Huang rising since the last time they polled this to overtake Chen, with Chiang still in the lead: 29.6%, to 28.1% for Huang, and 27.8% for Chen. Still a true three-cornered race. The results here are quite detailed and, as this writeup notes, show better favorability ratings for Huang and Chiang than Chen.
2022.10.27-29: TVBS poll shows Chiang still leading at 37% to Chen's 27%, and Huang in the rear at 21%. Some clear divergence from other polls in the last month that show Huang moving up.
2022.11.1-5: Another poll shows Huang losing ground. RWNews online poll finds Chiang at 36%, Chen at 33%, and Huang at 28%. Some speculation in the accompanying article that partisans are drifting back to their respective blue and green camps, and swing voters are abandoning Huang to vote strategically for one of the other two.

Rating: Leans KMT. Given his family background and relative youth, Chiang is the kind of candidate who can unite the party's fractious wings and appeal to the old guard of the KMT without alienating light blue and swing voters. Chen Shih-chung looked formidable as of a year ago but has seen his approval ratings decline as Taiwan has shifted away from a zero-COVID strategy. More relevant is that he's completely untested in electoral politics. A national poll from TPOF in July found more Taiwanese opposed (40.2%) than supported (37.6%) his decision to run for mayor.

It's hard to say what effect Huang would have on the race -- the TPP under Ko has moved toward the bluer end of the political spectrum, so my prior before seeing any polls was that her presence would hurt Chiang more. But Ko Wen-je also won two terms as mayor by appealing to young, green-leaning and independent voters; if Huang is able to draw support from these same blocs, as some polls are showing she might, perhaps it's Chen Shih-chung who is hurt more. At this point, with Huang not even formally in the race yet, my guess is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Result: KMT gain. Chiang Wan-an wins, 42.3-32.0-25.1%. CEC official results are here.

New Taipei - 新北市

KMT: Renominated incumbent mayor Hou You-yi (sometimes spelled Hou Yu-yih 侯友宜).
DPP: Nominated Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) on July 10.
Others: None.
T-PVI: B+2
Notes:

Hou has consistently polled among the most popular of Taiwan's local mayors over the past four years, and looks well-positioned to win re-election. He also looks like the strongest candidate the KMT could run in the 2024 presidential election; the outcome here could go a long way toward determining whether Hou actually declares for that race next year.
Lin was mayor of Taichung for one term, then after being defeated for reelection in 2018 became the Minister of Transport and Communications in the Tsai administration. He resigned from that office in April 2021 after a Taroko Express train derailed in Hualien, killing 49 people.
The DPP took a long time to select a candidate here. Legislator Lo Chih-cheng announced on July 3 that he had been asked to run but was going to turn down the nomination because the party had delayed the announcement for too long.
New Taipei is the only special municipality the DPP has never won; the current premier Su Tseng-chang was the last member of the party to win an election here, way back in 2001 when it was still Taipei County. It is now Taiwan's most populous jurisdiction, with over four million people.

Polls:

2022.9.13-17: RWNews online poll shows Hou leading Lin, 58-36%.
2022.9.21-23: Liberty Times finds Hou leading Lin 52-22%. The usual complaints about lack of transparency in LTN's methodology apply here (e.g. how'd they weight their sample?); even so, coming from a polling outfit with a consistently green house effect, that's a huge lead for Hou.
2022.10.14-17: ETToday poll shows Hou leading Lin 55-32%. Not a whole lot of movement in this one; partisans sticking with their camp's candidate, and Hou winning all the rest.

Rating: Likely KMT. Hou is a popular incumbent running against a recycled DPP candidate with no previous base in the city. He should win comfortably. A defeat for Hou here would signal absolute disaster for the KMT's fortunes. Conversely, if Hou wins big here while KMT candidates falter everywhere else, it's going to be very hard for the KMT not to nominate him for president. To me the results in Xinbei, not Taipei, will hold the greatest national political implications.

Result: KMT hold. Hou You-yi wins 62.4-37.6%.

Taoyuan - 桃園市

KMT: Nominated Simon Chang (Chang San-cheng 張善政), the party's 2020 VP candidate and former premier for a brief period at the end of the Ma administration.
DPP: Nominated Lin Chih-chien (林智堅), the incumbent mayor of Hsinchu City; Lin withdrew from the race on August 12, and the DPP announced legislator Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬) would run instead.
Others: Lai Hsiang-ling (賴香伶), a TPP party-list legislator, is also running. Former DPP legislator Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清) declared on August 27. No others.
T-PVI: B+4
Notes:

Popular incumbent Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) of the DPP is term-limited out. He's a potential candidate for president in 2024.
Both major parties nominated surprise candidates here, and both are now politically damaged. Chang was hand-picked by party chairman Eric Chu, apparently without consultation with local party power-brokers or legislators in the city who were blindsided by the decision. Chu also ignored strident appeals from Lo Chih-chiang, a former Ma administration spokesman and Taipei city councilor, who resigned his councilor seat and publicly declared he was running after Chu told him that he was not going to be nominated.
On the DPP side, the party dithered for a while before announcing that Lin, who is term-limited out in nearby Hsinchu City, would parachute in to run here. That seemed to be a safe (if uninspired) choice, and a way to help Lin (who is relatively young, at 47) keep his career in local politics going. But then some intrepid opponent researchers dug up credible evidence that Lin had plagiarized both of his master's theses, the first at Chung Hua University in 2008, and the second at National Taiwan University in 2017, submitted when he was already mayor of Hsinchu.
The pan-blue media has relentlessly hammered on these accusations, partly because the KMT's own candidate in the Kaohsiung by-election in 2020 to replace Han Kuo-yu, Li Mei-jhen (李眉蓁), was also accused of plagiarism and had to renounce her MA degree. It doesn't exactly help the DPP that Lin's thesis advisor was Chen Ming-tong, now the director-general of the National Security Bureau in the Tsai administration.
A twist here is that none of the three candidates has much previous connection to Taoyuan (all three have had to relocate their household registration to the city after entering the race). That may not matter much since many voters are also new to Taoyuan -- the city has grown more than any other municipality over the last decade and is now more populous than Taipei.
Update 8.12: Lin Chih-chien withdrew from the race on 8.12; the DPP immediately announced legislator Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬) would replace him. Cheng is the DPP's party caucus secretary in the Legislative Yuan and represents Taoyuan 1. He's won twice in a competitive district: 47-44% in 2016, and 46-43% in 2020.
Update 8.27: Another bad development here for the DPP: the former DPP legislator Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清) has announced he'll run as an independent for Taoyuan mayor. Part of his justification is that Cheng Yun-peng showed bad judgement by staunchly defending Lin in the thesis scandal. Cheng Pao-ching represented Taoyuan 4 from 2016-20 (a seat he won by only 160 votes), then narrowly lost reelection to current KMT legislator Wan Mei-ling (萬美玲) in 2020.
Update 9.2: Now Simon Chang is facing his own plagiarism charges, although the context is quite different. Chang worked at the computer manufacturer Acer from 2007-09, and he led a research team that got a large grant (~US$1.9 million) from the Council of Agriculture (awarded toward the end of the Chen Shui-bian administration -- so this was not a political handout from the KMT government that followed, although it's sometimes being characterized that way) to write a series of reports on enhancing e-commerce for Taiwan's agricultural sector. The published collection contains many passages that were copied without proper citation.

Polls:

2022.8.15-16: TVBS poll finds Chang leading Cheng Yun-peng and Lai Hsiang-ling, 39-28-8%, with 25% undecided.
2022.8.23-25: ETToday poll shows Chang leading Cheng Yun-peng, 39-26%, with Lai at 11%.
2022.9.1-9.8: TVBS poll shows Chang leading the pack again with 36%, despite the COA report news breaking at the beginning of this survey period; Cheng Yun-peng has 27%, Cheng Pao-ching 8%, and Lai at only 5%. The Cheng-on-Cheng intra-DPP split looks bad for the party's chances here. The TPP's Lai apparently hasn't gotten any traction so far despite the face-plants by both major parties.
2022.9.14-16: Liberty Times poll (again, methodology caveats aside) finds Cheng Yun-peng in the lead, barely, over Chang: 29-25%, with 7% for Cheng Pao-ching, and 5% for Lai. 35% of those polled were undecided. Take the blue and green pollster results together and they suggest a two-man race but with a lot of voters up for grabs.
2022.10.16-20: TVBS polls Taoyuan again, finds the race almost unchanged. Chang is holding his lead, 38-27% over Cheng Yun-peng, with Cheng Pao-ching at 6%, and Lai at 5%. 24% undecided.
2022.10.25-29: RWNews online poll shows Simon Chang in the lead over Cheng Yun-peng 46-41%. Compared to their previous polls, voters seem to be abandoning both Cheng Pao-ching and Lai Hsiang-ling and shifting toward one of the top two. A straight-up green-vs-blue race is better for the DPP, since they've got a very popular incumbent mayor and Taoyuan has trended green in recent years. But Cheng Yun-peng still appears to be behind.

Rating: Toss-up. The KMT's nomination process here was Not Great; they passed over two Taoyuan legislators to nominate Chang, and it's going to be a struggle for the party to get all the local KMT politicos to line up behind him. But the DPP's decision to nominate Lin is also not looking so hot now, either. Lin is a newcomer to Taoyuan, too, and the plagiarism accusations may also be taking a toll on his appeal -- the most recent news is that an NTU committee found the accusations credible and has recommended his degree be rescinded. Given the stumbles in both blue and green camps, Lai Hsiang-ling of the centrist TPP could actually have a shot here, or at least a chance to play spoiler.
Update 8.12: At this point, replacing Lin with Cheng probably helps the DPP. At the least, Cheng is from Taoyuan, and the switch happened early enough that he should be able to run a competitive campaign. The controversy over Lin's plagiarism cases was becoming a huge distraction for the party.
Update 8.27: Cheng Pao-ching's entry into the race complicates what has already become a difficult election for the DPP here. With the TPP's Lai not getting much traction in polls, Chang San-cheng now appears to have the edge.
Update 10.26: Leans KMT. A month out from the election, and Simon Chang keeps holding on to a significant lead in polls, although well short of 50%. The TPP's Lai hasn't made any headway, so this is trending in the opposite direction from Hsinchu City with the KMT the likely beneficiary of strategic voting, while Cheng Pao-ching appears to be pulling enough of the vote to doom Cheng Yun-peng. Rating change to Leans KMT.

Result: KMT gain. Simon Chang wins 52.0-40.0%.

Taichung - 台中市

KMT: Renominated incumbent mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕).
DPP: Nominated legislator and deputy LY speaker Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) on April 27.
Others: A third candidate, Chen Mei-fei (陳美妃) registered on the last day to run as an independent.
T-PVI: B+1
Notes:

Lu was previously a legislator (and a rival of former KMT chair and Taichung legislator Johnny Chiang 江啟臣), who barely edged out Chiang for the party's nomination here in 2018, then won a surprisingly large victory over Lin Chia-lung in the 2018 general election. Her approval ratings have lagged toward the bottom of all mayors around Taiwan, but she remains a formidable candidate--this TVBS poll (admittedly a blue news outlet with a consistently strong house effect in its polls) shows her with a 55-22% lead over Tsai at the end of June.
Tsai has represented Taichung's 1st district since 2012, and became deputy speaker in 2016. He is close to a generic replacement-level DPP candidate but could probably win if it's a strong DPP year.
Taichung has been a microcosm of national vote patterns over the last several election cycles. Lin Chia-lung won here in 2014 57-43%, and then Lu won it back for the KMT in 2018, also 57-43%. In between, Tsai Ing-wen won 45% of the vote in Taichung in 2012, 55% of the vote in 2016, and 57% in 2020: very close to her overall performance in each of those elections.
Update 9.2. The independent candidate here, Chen Mei-fei, is unusual: she is a political novice (政治素人) not backed by any political group, and she apparently used her own personal savings to pay the NT$1.5 million deposit (about US$48,000 at current exchange rates). The Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (Article 32) requires that candidates must obtain ≥ 10% of the winning vote share in order to have their deposits refunded after the election. So, Chen risks forfeiting this registration deposit unless she wins ≥5% of the vote.

Polls:

2022.9.8-14: ETToday poll shows Lu leading Tsai 54-33%.
2022.9.13-15: Formosa News with a detailed poll on the Taichung race. Among many findings here, Lu leads Tsai 59-20%. Also asks a more generic question about whether to switch parties or stick with KMT leader: that is in KMT's favor by a smaller margin, 54-25%.
2022.9.22-26: TISR (thrilled to see them back in the polling business) has a new high-quality poll out on Taichung. It shows Lu leading Tsai 50-20% (!). Yikes. Lu's trust and approval ratings are over 70% in this poll. If that's close to accurate, she's going to be hard to beat.

Rating: Leans KMT. This is another race to watch as a bellwether for national trends. As the incumbent, Lu starts out with some advantages, but she's not Hou: her personal appeal and networks aren't going to carry her to victory in a down year. My prior here is that the result will be driven by national trends rather than local issues and candidate quality. If it's a pro-DPP election nationally, Lu is in trouble. If it's not, she probably wins.
Update 10.26: Likely KMT. A month out from Election Day and this race hasn't moved much. Lu is looking much more popular, and Tsai worse, than I expected in August. Polls keep showing this race to be more like the KMT's version of Tainan or Kaohsiung than a swing city. Rating change to Likely KMT.

Result: KMT hold. Lu Shiow-yen wins 59.3-38.9%.

Tainan - 台南市

KMT: Nominated city councilor Hsieh Lung-chieh (謝龍介) on March 23.
DPP: Renominated incumbent Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲) (sometimes spelled Huang Wei-cher).
Others: Hsu Chung-hsin (許忠信), a former TSU legislator, has entered the race as an independent. Three others, including 2018 candidate Lin Yi-feng (林義豐).
T-PVI: G+11
Notes:

The KMT has never won here since Tainan City and County were merged into a special municipality in 2010. Ma Ying-jeou actually carried Tainan City in 2008 (isn't that amazing?), but since the merger with deep green Tainan County, KMT candidates face a near-hopeless task trying to compete here.
Even so, Huang Wei-che had an unexpectedly close race on his hands in 2018. Although he was the DPP's official nominee in a deep green city, four independent candidates pulled almost 30 percent of the vote, and he won with only 38% support. Huang appears to have been caught up in pan-green infighting in Tainan, which has been unusually public and acrimonious for several years now.
The 32.4% the previous KMT candidate got here in 2018 in a strongly anti-DPP year is probably an absolute ceiling for the party. For the KMT to win in Tainan now looks like it would require a perfect split of the vote among green candidates, or supporting a DPP factional leader as their nominee. If there's one place where it makes sense for the KMT to forego nominating anyone at all and trying instead to back an anti-DPP independent, Tainan is it.

Polls:

2022.9.23-29: ETToday poll shows Huang leading Hsieh, 50-29%. Everyone else is under 5%.
2022.10.18-22: RWNews online poll (see Chiayi City poll section for more details) has Huang ahead but not by a lot: 44% to Hsieh's 36%. Nobody else is polling more than 5%. For an incumbent mayor in a deep green city, Huang is coming in well below expectations in this poll.

Rating: Safe DPP. Huang's renomination by the DPP should ensure his election even if his Tainan rivals remain disgruntled and independents pull some of the pan-green vote away from him.

Result: DPP hold. Huang wins 48.8-43.6%.

Kaohsiung - 高雄市

KMT: Nominated former legislator Ko Chih-en (柯志恩) on June 29.
DPP: Renominated incumbent mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁).
Others: Two independent candidates.
T-PVI: G+6
Notes:

Ko is a faculty member at Tamkang University in Tamsui, New Taipei. Her father Ko Wen-fu (柯文福) was magistrate of Pingtung County from 1973-1981, so she comes from a political family. In 2016, she was ranked second on the KMT's party list, ensuring her a seat for the 2016-2020 term. [correction 9.23]: In 2020 she ran for the LY in New Taipei 7, losing 46-40% to Lo Chih-cheng, then returned to teaching. She has also headed the KMT's National Policy Foundation. She moved her household registration from New Taipei to Kaohsiung for this election.
Chen Chi-mai has already had a long career in the DPP, serving as a legislator, acting mayor of Kaohsiung, EY spokesman, and deputy secretary-general of the presidential office. His shocking loss to Han Kuo-yu in 2018 did not ultimately set back his political ambitions much; he was instead elevated to the central government where he served as vice premier before returning to contest the by-election after Han's recall in June 2020.
Chen is the son of Chen Che-nan (陳哲男), a KMT-turned-DPP legislator in the 1990s who later served as a close aide to Chen Shui-bian in the Presidential Office. After Chen Shui-bian left office, Chen Che-nan was convicted and served three years in prison on bribery charges.

Polls:

2022.9.28-30: ETToday poll shows Chen leading Ko 54-31%. Within the range of expectations but I'm a bit surprised Ko is polling that well. Perhaps she's more appealing to pan-blue voters than I thought.

Rating: Safe DPP. Han Kuo-yu pulled off a miracle by winning in Kaohsiung in 2018--a feat that nobody thought was possible in a city that's been a DPP bastion for more than two decades. But the "Han craze" is much diminished now, since he lost the 2020 presidential election and was then recalled by Kaohsiung voters in June 2020. Chen Chi-mai easily won the subsequent by-election and is well-placed for reelection.

Result: DPP hold. Chen Chi-mai wins 58.1-40.2%

Part II covers county-level executive races in north and central Taiwan. Part III covers the south, east, and offshore islands. Part IV offers some concluding thoughts.

Published on: January 11, 2016

Five Things to Watch for on Election Night in Taiwan

If 2016 looks like this, the KMT's LY majority is in big trouble.

Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP are headed for a historic victory in Saturday’s elections, and the battle has already begun to define the narrative about what that means. One fairly common refrain is that this likely outcome will presage a fundamental realignment of the party system around issues beyond the blue-green divide over cross-Strait relations.

I’m skeptical that we are about to see this kind of realigning election, despite the attention given to the campaigns of the so-called “Third Force” parties. I’m also skeptical that this result will be the death knell for the KMT as a political party capable of winning elections. The KMT's coming defeat clearly reflects deep unhappiness with Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT’s rule over the last eight years, intensified by a spectacularly ill-timed economic downturn over the last few months (at least if you are a KMT member!) But an unpopular leader, toxic party brand, and disillusioned supporters are not fatal to major party survival, as the DPP showed after its 2008 electoral thrashing. So while a KMT recovery is not assured, and will at a minimum require some major leadership shakeups, we shouldn't expect the party simply to fade away, and for all those pan-blue supporters (still at least 30 percent of the electorate) to suddenly become fans of the DPP or one of the new parties.

Of course, I could be totally wrong--I'm just some guy on the internet, after all. But either way, we'll know a lot more soon: elections have a nice way of splashing everybody with a cold dose of reality. The results of the election this Saturday will give us the most concrete evidence we'll have to evaluate these competing narratives. So, in the interest of intellectual honesty, let me lay out my own expectations about what will happen, and what it means. Beyond who wins and loses, here's what I'll be watching most closely to see where Taiwanese politics is headed.

Published on: September 26, 2014

Ma vs Wang, Lesson 3: Ma thought removing Wang would solve his problems with the legislature. It won't.

For previous posts in this series: intro, one, two.

Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng turns down an offer to be the vice-presidential candidate on the KMT ticket, as Ma Ying-jeou looks on, May 31, 2007.

What motivated President Ma to attempt to expel Wang Jin-pyng from the KMT last September? One possibility is that Ma was genuinely troubled by the compelling evidence in the influence-peddling case brought against Wang, and saw the revelations as a moment to take a stand against corruption within the KMT’s legislative caucus. It’s hard to square this theory with the inconsistent reaction of Ma to other cases of scandal in the KMT, though, as this blog post by Frozen Garlic notes.

Another possibility is that the dispute was personal. There’s ample evidence of a long-running Ma-Wang rivalry that goes back at least to the party chairman’s election in 2005, when Ma trounced Wang with over 70 percent of valid votes. As Ma prepared to run for president, Wang declined an invitation to run on the ticket as Ma’s vice president. So there may be some lingering animosity from this history. But this story isn’t very convincing, either. For one, savvy politicians rarely let personal feelings get in the way of political strategy—and those that do tend not to last in politics very long.

I think the answer lies elsewhere. If we think entirely in strategic terms, stripped of emotion and morals, there are two institutional reasons why Ma might have viewed Wang Jin-pyng in his role as speaker of the Legislative Yuan as a major impediment to his agenda, and thus sought to replace him with a more pliable figure.

1. Wang chairs the Cross-Party Negotiation Committee. The Cross-Party Negotiation Committee (in Chinese: 黨團協商, 政黨協商 or 朝野協商) is the body charged with resolving inter-party conflicts over legislative procedure. As this article details, it was created in the late 1990s in an attempt to reduce uncertainty and increase legislative efficiency, which had been disrupted by “wildcat” protests by opposition legislators. It came into force in 1999, the same year that Wang Jin-pyng became LY speaker, so its role is inextricably intertwined with Wang’s stewardship as the head of the legislature.

As far as I have been able to tell, the CPNC is not well understood, even among Taiwanese political scientists who specialize in legislative politics. The basic rules (detailed here) are:

Every party caucus (which requires a minimum of 3 members) is allowed one representative, typically the party caucus whip.
The CNPC meets at the discretion of the LY Speaker; in practice this happens whenever there's a boycott or blockade in the legislature, which has happened at least 80 times in this LY.
Discussions are supposed to be recorded or otherwise made public; this rule is blatantly and routinely violated.
Any legislative action agreed to by all party representatives in the CNPC will not be opposed by individual members of each caucus, allowing for expedited reviews, votes, or other legislative actions.

I've not been able to identify any consensus about the ultimate effect the CPNC has on the conduct of legislative business. At one extreme, the CPNC could be working to formalize a minority party veto over all legislative action. That is, because all parties have to agree in the CNPC, even the smallest parties (the Taiwan Solidarity Union right now has only 3 members) could effectively block controversial legislation by withholding agreement in the committee. That would require virtually everything to pass with the consent of all parties--an alarmingly high threshold for policy change.

At the other extreme, the CPNC could just function as a more formal version of the informal discussions that take place all the time between different parties in the legislature, and give no extra meaningful authority in practice to opposition parties.

The conversations I've had with people at the legislature suggest that the CPNC looks a lot more like the second situation than the first: to the extent negotiations in this body are meaningful, it is because the opposition parties are able to do things outside the CPNC to block majority action on legislation. And if negotiations in the committee actually were on the record, as the statute requires, the party leaders would simply move them out of that committee and somewhere else private. Thus, the CPNC is not really the place where the president's agenda goes to die. If President Ma thought getting rid of Wang would gut the CNPC and streamline legislative action, he had the wrong target in mind.

2. Wang does not use police force to end opposition blockades. Rather than in the Cross-Party Negotiation Committee, the opposition's power to block ruling party legislation lies primarily in its ability to occupy the speaker's podium, and thus to prevent legislative sessions from being gaveled in. As I noted in the previous post, this type of action is something like a filibuster, and it is not absolute; the KMT caucus ended one of these blockades by physically removing opposition legislators from the podium prior to the passage of ECFA in 2010. The inability of the KMT to repeat that success in recent months is probably because of dissension within the majority party caucus itself, rather than anything the opposition is doing differently.

DPP legislator Chang Chun-hsiung (right) slaps Legislative Yuan Speaker Liang Su-jung at the speaker's podium, April 12, 1991.

A shoving match is not the only way the majority party could counter an opposition party blockade of the speaker's podium, however. The Speaker also has the authority to call in the LY's security force to restore order. As this article describes, the "sergeant at arms" power (警察權) has been used a total of six times, all before 1992 when the legislature was fully democratic (i.e. the majority of legislators were still permanent representatives of mainland China):

1988.12.06: DPP legislators objecting to the continued presence of permanent unelected "Eternal Legislators" (萬年立委) try to grab the microphone from the speaker, Liu Kuo-tsai (劉闊才), starting a fight. Liu calls in the police and throws the DPP legislators out of the chambers.
1989.07.04: As a protest against the unelected legislators, DPP legislator Wu Yung-hsiung (吳勇雄) stands at the presentation podium (發言台) and refuses to budge. Speaker Liu calls security personnel in to have him removed from the chamber.
1990.05.29: Hau Pei-tsun, the sitting Minister of Defense and a retired military general, is nominated to be the next premier by President Lee Teng-hui. During the confirmation hearing, the DPP criticizes the nomination, calling Hau the head of a new “military cabinet” (軍人組閣). (Until 1997, premiers had to receive LY confirmation before taking office.) During the confirmation vote, a physical altercation breaks out between KMT and opposition LY members, and Speaker Liang calls in security to restrain the opposition.
1990.11.06: DPP members are unhappy that Speaker Liang permits Premier Hau to give perfunctory answers to legislators (“敷衍兩句“). A fight breaks out while Hau's remarks are being read into the official record, and Liang again calls in security to quash the opposition’s protests.
1990.12.18: Upset at the KMT caucus's sudden change to the legislative agenda, the DPP caucus starts a group protest, and DPP legislator Wei Yao-kan (魏耀乾) unplugs the microphone while Speaker Liang is attempting to start the session. For the third time in a year, Liang calls in security personnel, who struggle to restrain DPP legislators and restore order.
1991.04.12: The best-known incident: DPP legislator and future premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) approaches Speaker Liang at the podium, hands him a letter of protest, and then without warning lightly slaps him, telling him that this is a “wake-up call” from the Taiwan people. Furious, Liang orders security into the chamber. DPP legislator Lu Hsiu-yi (盧修一) rushes to defend Chang, ends up injured at the bottom of the scrum with the police, and is sent to the hospital. A few moments of the confrontation can be seen in the video accompanying this news story.

Given these precedents, then, during any of the dozens of times the opposition parties have occupied the podium over the last year, Wang could have used this power to have them removed. And this presumably would have allowed action on everything on President Ma's agenda, including the Cross-Strait Services in Trade Agreement. So in a strictly legal sense, Speaker Wang has not used every weapon in his arsenal to ensure legislative action on executive priorities. He is allowing the opposition to block legislation without consequences. From Ma's perspective, then, a speaker more sympathetic to the president's agenda could use this power to end opposition blockades--thus, in all probability, the attempt to get rid of Wang.

Speaker Wang, still banging away.

Ma Might Think Getting Rid of Wang Will Tame the Legislature. It Won't.
If we view the Speaker's authority over the legislature in its historical context, the picture is not nearly so simple. First, the sergeant-at-arms power has never been used in the democratic era. Taiwan today is a strikingly different place from Taiwan in 1991: most obviously, all legislators are subject to direct elections now. Calling in the police would be the political equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on the legislature. The opposition would no doubt go all-out to resist a police action in the legislative chambers and to play up the violence and drama, and the image of security forces dragging out opposition legislators would attract not only blanket domestic news coverage but probably also a great deal of opprobrium from abroad as well.

It's also just not Wang's style--he's been able to survive as speaker in large part because he's viewed as a fair-minded and consensus-oriented leader, one of the few people who is well-connected and respected among both political camps. And even if Wang were in theory willing to entertain the idea, the fate of the last speaker to call in the police should give him pause: Liang Su-jung lasted barely over a year in the position before he had to resign.

It's conceivable that, had Ma succeeded last September in expelling Wang from the party and creating a vacancy for the speaker's office, a Ma ally could have been installed in the position--someone like the KMT caucus whip Lin Hung-chih (林洪池). But he would face the same basic dilemma: he doesn't have the internal party unity to win a showdown with the DPP, and using the police to remove opposition legislators would impose a huge political cost. I'm skeptical that the KMT caucus would agree to bear that cost, or that they would support a nominee for speaker who was willing to impose it.

Thus, removing Wang Jin-pyng from the Speaker's position was not likely to change the underlying situation much. Even if it had succeeded, I think Ma's attempt to purge Wang was a serious strategic miscalculation, and indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legislature works.

Published on: October 4, 2013

This Week in Taiwan -- October 4

A weekly summary of political news from Taiwan

Trouble in the Family (煮豆燃萁). The "Ma-Wang showdown" erupted into a full-blown political scandal in the past week. On Sunday, news broke that phone surveillance by the Special Investigative Division (SID) of the Supreme Prosecutor's Office had been much more extensive than previously revealed. The SID's wiretaps included the phones of other legislators besides Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘), the DPP's party whip and the office's initial target. It also apparently included the legislature's central switchboard. Even prominent KMT officials including New Taipei City mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫), Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-pin (郝龍斌), and Taoyuan County John Wu (吳志揚) are inveighing against the SID.

The revelation has put the methods used to approve wiretapping under intense scrutiny, particularly by people who are well-placed to do something about it: the legislators themselves. Suddenly, individual privacy and especially proper judicial procedure are hot issues for discussion.

Besieged on All Sides (四面楚歌) At the center of the political storm is the SID's chief prosecutor Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘). Huang is under fire for two separate issues: potentially overstepping the SID's authority to wiretap, and improper collusion with President Ma in the announcement of the case against Wang Jin-pyng.

The Ministry of Justice has formed a task force to investigate the wiretapping allegations, and Huang has already been grilled by members of the legislature over the matter. Then there is the separate leak investigation opened by the Taipei District Prosecutor's Office, for which Huang, President Ma, Ma's former deputy secretary Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強), and Premier Jiang have all been summoned to give testimony. To complicate matters further, the Control Yuan (檢察院), an odd and increasingly irrelevant relic of the original Sun Yat-sen-designed constitution that is supposed to monitor government behavior, has joined the fun and broadened its own investigation of "improper influence" by officials. In case you've lost count, that's three separate investigations that Huang Shih-ming has triggered in the past week.

With all the controversy swirling around him, Huang has not fallen on his sword to protect Ma Ying-jeou, either, doing little to dispel the impression that his actions were closely coordinated with the Presidential Office and seeming more interested in saving his own skin. Ma’s popularity ratings are pretty dismal, registering at 15% in some recent polls. Ma, for his part, has denied trying to influence the Special Investigative Division's actions.

Schadenfreude (幸災樂禍). All the scrutiny of Huang this week has crowded out the original story of possible malfeasance by Wang Jin-pyng and Ker Chien-ming. Remarkably, Ker is now suing both Huang and Ma. For his part, Wang won another court decision on Monday, sustaining his injunction against being expelled from the KMT. The next step: the Supreme Court. If the injunction is upheld there, then Wang will probably survive through the end of the term, as his lawsuit against the KMT may not be settled for years.

Lest the DPP gain too much enjoyment out of the KMT's turmoil, allegations of malfeasance against one of their own were also in the news this week. Tsai Ying-wen (蔡英文), the DPP's former party chairwoman and 2012 presidential candidate, was censured by the Control Yuan for "dereliction of duty" in her role as vice premier in 2007. Tsai approved government investments in a biotech start-up that totaled about US $1.4 billion, then later worked as a spokesperson for the company after leaving government. Notably, the same Special Investigative Division that's now in hot water over wiretapping closed its investigation into the Tsai case in August 2012, finding no evidence of wrongdoing. That fact plus the timing of the announcement suggests a possible political motive behind the decision, and may generate more interest in the DPP in abolishing the Control Yuan.

Published on: September 27, 2013

This Week in Taiwan -- September 27

A weekly summary of political news from Taiwan.

All eyes on me. The biggest news of the week continues to be the attempted expulsion of Taiwan's speaker of the Legislative Yuan, Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) of the KMT, by his own party. Wang's fate depends on the outcome of a case now before the Taiwan High Court. On September 12 the KMT's Central Evaluation and Discipline Commission (黨中央考紀會) revoked his party membership, apparently on orders from President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), for alleged "influence peddling" in a court case against DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘). Because Wang holds an at-large seat on the KMT's party list, rather than a district seat, the party action against him was expected to force him out of the legislature. But Wang's legal team managed to win a temporary court injunction against his removal on September 13.

For the time being, Wang retains his seat but has been barred from participating in KMT party activities. The attempt to expel him has laid bare some serious tensions within the ruling KMT, forcing a delay in the party's planned 19th party conference that was scheduled to begin on September 29.

Gang of Five. A weekly policy meeting of five key figures in the KMT--president Ma, vice president Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), KMT secretary-general Tseng Yung-chuan (曾永權), and legislative speaker Wang Jin-pyng--will resume, with KMT legislative caucus whip Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池) taking Wang's place. The move is one of several that appear intended to further isolate Wang and his allies in the party and consolidate president Ma's authority, as well as improve cooperation between the executive and legislative branches. Of particular note is that Wang's allies potentially include the former vice president and presidential candidate Lien Chan (連戰) and his son, Sean Lien (連勝文).

Can you hear me now? Another bit of fallout from the "Ma axes Wang" (馬鍘王) affair with far-reaching political implications is the revelation that the Special Investigative Division (特別偵查組) of the Supreme Prosecutor's Office (最高法院檢察署) had been wiretapping the phones of DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming. The evidence of Wang's intervention in the legal case against Ker was reported directly to President Ma, who highlighted it in his press conference announcing the party's disciplinary actions. That raises potentially troubling questions about prosecutorial independence, the appropriate use of secret wire-tapping and domestic spying, and the balance of power in legislative-executive relations.

On Wednesday, Ker got his chance to fire back when Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) testified before the legislature. At least one KMT legislator is not so happy about the existence of wiretapping, either. One thing to keep an eye on is whether more KMT legislators eventually push back publicly against the executive branch, or whether the shared interest in protecting the institutional authority of the legislature is trumped by party loyalty.

Give it a shot [奪力一搏]. The elections for the five special municipalities (直轄市) -- Taipei, New Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung, and Tainan -- aren't until late 2014, but there's already jockeying for the KMT and DPP party nominations. The highest-profile race is in Taipei, where the incumbent mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) of the KMT is term-limited. This week Wellington Koo (顧立雄), a lawyer and former advisor to the presidents Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian, confirmed he was interested in running on the DPP ticket. Another name mentioned frequently is Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), a physician and chief of the intensive care unit at National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei--though Ko is not currently a member of the DPP. Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) is also reportedly interested.

For the KMT, Sean Lien (連勝文) is polling well but has not stated publicly whether he will will run. The Taipei Times reports that four others have already declared their intention to seek the KMT nomination: legislators Alex Tsai (蔡正元) and Ting Shou-chung (丁守中), and Taipei City councilors Yang Shi-chiu (楊實秋) and Chin Hui-chu (秦慧珠).

In the New Taipei City race, former DPP premier Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃) announced this week that he would seek the party's nomination. He joins former legislator Chuang Suo-hang (莊碩漢) as announced candidates. New Taipei DPP party chief Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) is also openly considering a bid. The incumbent mayor, Eric Chu (朱立倫) of the KMT, is eligible to run again but may run for Taipei mayor instead. He is also frequently mentioned as a leading candidate for the 2016 presidential election.

About Me

I am a political scientist with research interests in democratization, elections and election management, parties and party system development, one-party dominance, and the links between domestic politics and external security issues. My regional expertise is in East Asia, with special focus on Taiwan.

Taiwan's 2026 Local Elections Preview (3) -- North and Central Taiwan

Keelung 基隆市

Yilan 宜蘭縣

Hsinchu City 新竹市

Hsinchu County 新竹縣

Miaoli County 苗栗縣

Nantou County 南投縣

Changhua County 彰化縣

The Curious Case of the Taiwan People's Party, Part 1: Policy, Office, or Votes?

Previewing Taiwan's 2022 Local Elections (II): North and Central Taiwan

Keelung City - 基隆市

Yilan County - 宜蘭縣

Hsinchu City - 新竹市

Hsinchu County - 新竹縣

Miaoli County - 苗栗縣

Nantou County - 南投縣

Changhua County - 彰化縣

Taiwan's 2022 Local Elections: Previewing the Campaign (I)

Taipei - 台北市

New Taipei - 新北市

Taoyuan - 桃園市

Taichung - 台中市

Tainan - 台南市

Kaohsiung - 高雄市

Five Things to Watch for on Election Night in Taiwan

Ma vs Wang, Lesson 3: Ma thought removing Wang would solve his problems with the legislature. It won't.

This Week in Taiwan -- October 4

This Week in Taiwan -- September 27

About Me

Archives

Categories