As election day looms, foreign press focuses on China despite local concerns

By Teng Pei-ju, Joseph Yeh, Alison Hsiao, Sean Lin and Chung Yu-chen, CNA staff reporters

As foreign media outlets descend upon Taiwan ahead of the 2024 presidential and legislative elections, overseas coverage is likely to remain tightly focused on the country's dealings with an increasingly bellicose China.

Thompson Chau (周浩霖), chairman of the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents' Club (TFCC), told CNA in a recent interview that international media will be most interested in knowing how the contenders for president plan to navigate the relationship with Beijing and Washington.

Ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Lai Ching-te (賴清德), the current frontrunner, has pledged to continue President Tsai Ing-wen's (蔡英文) policy of emphasizing Taiwan's sovereignty and seeking support from Washington and other democracies.

Lai's main rival, the Kuomintang's (KMT) Hou Yu-ih (侯友宜), is looking to adopt the approach of Tsai's predecessor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), including promoting greater economic integration between Taiwan and China.

Chau said correspondents were paying close attention to the candidates' proposals to boost the country's defense capabilities as well as economic and energy security.

Many are also trying to grasp China's disinformation operations, election meddling tactics, and other coercive measures and how they could be "play[ed] out in Taiwan," according to Chau, who covers Taiwan's politics and defense for Nikkei Asia.

Tsou Tzung-han (鄒宗翰), the head of Deutsche Welle's (DW) Taipei Bureau, said cross-strait relations were the focus of the German public broadcaster's coverage of the presidential race.

In particular, Tsou said he and his colleagues would keep an eye on how China will react in the event of a win for Lai, the incumbent vice president, and his running mate Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴).

In November, a Chinese official handling Taiwanese affairs called the DPP ticket "dangerous" and warned any attempt to push for Taiwanese independence "means war."

Factoring geopolitics in the election, Tsou said the DPP was "putting all its eggs in one basket" as it seeks to continue working closely with Washington, while third-party contender Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the Taiwan People's Party (TPP) had been "ambiguous" about his cross-strait policy.

Minding the gap

While Lai remains ahead in the three-way race with only four weeks to go, Hou has made steady progress in closing the gap since teaming up with media personality Jaw Shau-kong (趙少康) after failing to form a joint opposition ticket with Ko.

The latest polls published by TVBS and My-Formosa.com showed that Lai and Hsiao only led the Hou-Jaw ticket by approximately 3-4 percentage points.

In a tight race, Yasuhito Watanabe, chief of Kyodo News' Taipei Bureau, said he was watching closely if there will be a change in government, especially after eight years of DPP rule.

A victory for Lai will bring about a third consecutive four-year term of the DPP in office, unprecedented for any party in the Republic of China (Taiwan's official name) since the country held its first direct presidential election in 1996.

Echoing Watanabe, freelance journalist Leonardo Pape noted that Taiwanese voters had expressed disenchantment about the current state of the country.

Pape, who contributes to the Association of Public Broadcasting Corporations in the Federal Republic of Germany (ARD), drew on the experience back home as saying many Germans had become "tired" by the time Chancellor Angela Merkel left office in 2021 after 16 years in power.

Jana Václavíková, a correspondent with Czech news website Aktuálně, said that most voters she spoke to seemed to be more concerned with how the next president would tackle salary stagnation and spiraling rents than with China.

All politics is local

In contrast to the foreign media's focus on cross-strait affairs, several correspondents noted that the Taiwanese public's discontent with the DPP appeared driven more by domestic issues, such as low wages, high house prices and rising cost of living.

Bruno Kaufmann, a correspondent with Swiss public broadcaster SWI swissinfo.ch, said that these local issues, while certainly not unique to Taiwan, had become voters' primary concern.

Danish reporter Alexander Sjöberg said that young people in Taiwan viewed the DPP government as having failed to adequately address these issues, despite crediting Tsai's administration for progressive changes such as legalizing same-sex marriage in 2019.

A Hong Kong journalist who identifies himself as "Paklam" noticed that the Taiwanese public had paid more attention to the "day-to-day" problems of inflation and anemic wage growth than partisan political enmity between the DPP, KMT and TPP.

Paklam, a resident of Taiwan, said he was surprised by how the prices of basic commodities had skyrocketed over the past year, noting that none of the candidates had made this issue central to their campaign.

Sjöberg, who covers Asia for Denmark's Berlingske, went further, saying that a concentration on cross-strait relations had pushed other important issues, including political reform and welfare and tax policies, to the sidelines.

Pape, meanwhile, said that while all the candidates had proposed social programs, they never talked about how to generate funding - notably taxation - to fulfill their goals.

Migrant workers

One topic that has gained attention among many Southeast Asian reporters has been the issues facing Taiwan's nearly 740,000 migrant workers.

Aubrey Fanani, an Indonesian reporter working with IndosuarA, expressed hope for the candidates to propose solutions to the broker system problem in Taiwan, under which migrant workers are not allowed to change employers freely and are often burdened with exorbitant debts.

Amiel Reyes Pascual, a correspondent for the Philippines' UNTV News and Rescue, told CNA that viewers of the television network were interested in knowing how the next president would deal with issues relating to migrant workers in Taiwan.

Pascual mentioned that UNTV also focuses on cross-strait relations because China's use of bullying tactics against Taiwan, such as suspending imports of Taiwanese products, had led to a decrease in orders, subsequently impacting the working hours and wages of migrant workers.

Hong Kong

Paklam, a contributor for two Hong Kong media companies, said interest in Taiwan's elections among the media and public there had dwindled after Beijing ramped up its encroachment on the city's autonomy and civil liberties.

With Hongkongers' hopes for a more democratic way to elect the city's chief executive having faded and Taiwan's presidential candidates paying little attention to the former British colony, the city's people have "mixed feelings" about the election, he said.

Head of the Hong Kong Journalists' Association Ronson Chan (陳朗昇) told Radio Free Asia in October that the journalist group might not arrange a delegation to Taiwan in January like it had done for past elections, citing concerns over tensions across the Taiwan Strait and the National Security Law in Hong Kong.

The legislation renders acts deemed by authorities as secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion punishable with a life sentence at the maximum, and has since its imposition in June 2020 led to the closure of several Hong Kong media firms critical of Beijing's grip on the city.

For Hong Kong students and residents who live in Taiwan and wish to obtain permanent residency in the country, they are most concerned about whether the next Taiwanese government will further tighten its rules over national security reasons, Paklam said.

The stability of the cross-strait relations is also important for them, according to Paklam. "If the situation becomes increasingly strained, I believe more people will seriously consider relocating to safer places."

Enditem/ASG