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    Who Is Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s Next President?

    A former doctor with a humble background, Mr. Lai is seen as more attuned to the mood of Taiwan’s people than to the perilous nuances of dealing with Beijing.In 2014, when Lai Ching-te was a rising political star in Taiwan, he visited China and was quizzed in public about the most incendiary issue for leaders in Beijing: his party’s stance on the island’s independence.His polite but firm response, people who know him say, was characteristic of the man who was on Saturday elected president and is now set to lead Taiwan for the next four years.Mr. Lai was addressing professors at the prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai, an audience whose members, like many mainland Chinese, almost certainly believed that the island of Taiwan belongs to China.Mr. Lai said that while his Democratic Progressive Party had historically argued for Taiwan’s independence — a position that China opposes — the party also believed that any change in the island’s status had to be decided by all its people. His party was merely reflecting, not dictating, opinion, he said. The party’s position “had been arrived at through a consensus in Taiwanese society,” Mr. Lai said.To both his supporters and his opponents, the episode revealed Mr. Lai’s blunt, sometimes indignant sense of conviction, a key quality of this doctor-turned-politician who will take office in May, succeeding President Tsai Ing-wen.“He makes clear-cut distinctions between good and evil,” said Pan Hsin-chuan, a Democratic Progressive Party official in Tainan, the southern city where Mr. Lai was mayor at the time of his 2014 visit to Fudan University. “He insists that right is right, and wrong is wrong.”The son of a coal miner, Mr. Lai, 64, has a reputation for being a skilled, hard-working politician who sees his humble background as attuning him to the needs of ordinary people in Taiwan. When it comes to navigating the hazardous nuances of dealing with Beijing, however, he may be less adept.Supporters of Mr. Lai at a campaign event in Taipei on Saturday.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesMr. Lai may have to watch his tendency for occasional off-the-cuff remarks, which Beijing could exploit and turn into crises.“I don’t think that Lai is actually going to pursue de jure independence,” said David Sacks, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies Taiwan. “But what I do worry about is that Lai doesn’t have that much experience in foreign policy and cross-strait relations — which is incredibly complex — and he is prone to a slip of the tongue, that Beijing pounces on.”In interviews with those who know Mr. Lai, “stubborn” or “firm” are words often used to describe him. But as Taiwan’s president, Mr. Lai may have to show some flexibility as he deals with a legislature that is dominated by opposition parties that have vowed to scrutinize his policies.As the leader taking the Democratic Progressive Party into power for a third term, Mr. Lai would have to be very attentive to the public mood in Taiwan, Wang Ting-yu, an influential lawmaker from the Democratic Progressive Party, said an interview before the election.“How to keep the trust of the people, how to keep politics clean and above board: that’s what a mature political party has to face up to,” Mr. Wang said. “You must always keep in mind that the public won’t allow much room for mistakes.”During the election campaign, one of Mr. Lai’s most successful ads showed him and President Tsai on a country drive together, chatting amicably about their time working together. The message made clear when Ms. Tsai handed over the car keys to Mr. Lai, who has been her vice president since 2020, was that there would be reassuring continuity if he won.Whatever continuity may unite the two in policy, Ms. Tsai and Mr. Lai are quite different leaders with very different backgrounds. President Tsai, who has led Taiwan for eight years, remains liked and respected by many. But she also governed with a kind of technocratic reserve, rarely giving news conferences.Ms. Tsai rose as an official negotiating trade deals and crafting policy toward China. Mr. Lai’s background as a city mayor, by contrast, has made him more sensitive to problems like rising housing costs and a shortage of job opportunities, his supporters say.“Lai Ching-te has come all the way from the grass roots — as a congress delegate, legislator, mayor, premier — climbing up step by step,” said Tseng Chun-jen, a longtime activist for the D.P.P. in Tainan. “He’s suffered through cold and poverty, so he understands very well the hardships that we people went through at the grass roots in those times.”Ms. Tsai and Mr. Lai have not always been allies. Ms. Tsai brought the D.P.P. back to power in 2016 after it had earlier suffered a devastating loss at the polls. Mr. Lai was her premier — until he quit after poor election results and boldly challenged her in a primary before the 2020 election.Mr. Lai, left, with President Tsai Ing-wen, center, at a rally in Taipei this month.Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times“Tsai Ing-wen joined the D.P.P. as an outsider, when the D.P.P. needed an outsider,” said Jou Yi-cheng, a former senior official with the party who got to know Mr. Lai when he was starting out in politics. “But Lai Ching-te is different. He’s grown up within the D.P.P.”Mr. Lai spent his early years in Wanli, a northern Taiwanese township. His father died from carbon monoxide poisoning while down a mine when Mr. Lai was a baby, leaving Mr. Lai’s mother to raise six children herself.In his campaigning, Mr. Lai has cited the hardships of his past as part of his political makeup.He said in a video that his family used to live at a miner’s lodge in the township, which would leak when it rained, prompting them to cover the roof with lead sheets — which were not always reliable. “When a typhoon came, the things covering the roof would be blown away,” he said. Mr. Lai kept at his studies and went to medical school. After doing military service, he worked as a doctor in Tainan. It was a time when Taiwan was throwing off decades of authoritarian rule under the Nationalist Party, whose leaders had fled to the island from China after defeat by Mao Zedong and his Communist forces.Mr. Lai joined what was at the time a scrappy new opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, and he later recalled that his mother was disappointed when he decided to set aside medicine to go into politics full time.“He got his mother’s reluctant support,” wrote Yuhkow Chou, a Taiwanese journalist, in her recent biography of Mr. Lai. When he first decided to run for a seat in the National Assembly in 1996, Ms. Chou wrote, Mr. Lai’s mother told her son, “If you fail to get elected, go back to being a doctor.”However, Mr. Lai turned out to be a gifted politician. He rose quickly, helped by his appetite for hard work as well as his youthful good looks and eloquence as a speaker, especially in Taiwanese, the first language of many of the island’s people, especially in southern areas like Tainan, said Mr. Jou, the former party official.Voters lining up in Taipei on Saturday.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesMr. Lai became a member of Taiwan’s legislature and then, in 2010, the mayor of Tainan. Later he served as premier and vice president to Ms. Tsai. Along the way, he revealed a combative streak that gave his critics ammunition, but also won him fans in his party.D.P.P. supporters cite a clip of him in 2005, lashing out at opposing Nationalist Party members in the legislature for blocking a budget proposal to buy U.S. submarines, jets and missiles. “The country has been destroyed by you!” he said, cursing at one point. “You guys have blocked everything.”As premier in 2017, Mr. Lai made the comment most often cited by his critics. Facing questions from Taiwanese lawmakers, Mr. Lai described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwanese independence.”At the time, China’s government office for Taiwan affairs condemned the comment; ever since, Beijing and Mr. Lai’s Taiwanese critics have held it up as proof of his reckless pursuit of independence. But Mr. Lai’s words were in line with his party’s broader effort to rein in tensions over the issue of Taiwan’s status by arguing that the island had already achieved practical independence, because it was a self-ruled democracy.Still, Mr. Lai will be under great pressure to avoid such remarks as president. China has grown stronger militarily and, under Xi Jinping, increasingly willing to use that force to pressure Taiwan. In his election night victory speech, Mr. Lai emphasized his hope of opening dialogue with Beijing.“He kept it vague and, to my ear, he didn’t say any of the phrases that Beijing finds intolerable,” said Kharis Templeman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who studies Taiwan and monitored the election. “He gave himself a fighting chance to avoid, or at least delay, the harshest reaction from Beijing.” More

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    The Wild Card in Taiwan’s Election: Frustrated Young Voters

    An important bloc for the governing party, the island’s youth are focusing on bread-and-butter issues and have helped propel the rise of an insurgent party.In the months leading up to a pivotal presidential election for Taiwan, candidates have focused on who can best handle the island democracy’s volatile relationship with China, with its worries about the risks of war. But at a recent forum in Taipei, younger voters instead peppered two of the candidates with questions about everyday issues like rent, telecom scams and the voting age.It was a telling distillation of the race, the outcome of which will have far-reaching implications for Taiwan. The island is a potential flashpoint between the United States and China, which claims Taiwan as its territory and has signaled that it could escalate military threats if the Democratic Progressive Party wins.But many Taiwanese voters, especially those in their 20s and 30s, say they are weary of geopolitics and yearn for a campaign more focused on their needs at home. In interviews, they spoke of rising housing costs, slow income growth and narrowing career prospects. A considerable number expressed disillusionment with Taiwan’s two dominant parties, the governing Democratic Progressive Party and the opposition Nationalist Party.That sentiment has helped propel the rise of a third: the Taiwan People’s Party, an upstart that has gained traction in the polls partly by tapping into frustration over bread-and-butter issues, especially among younger people. The two main parties have also issued policy packages promising to address these anxieties.In interviews, younger voters voiced concerns about rising housing costs, slow income growth and narrowing career prospects. An Rong Xu for The New York TimesWhom young people ultimately vote for — and how many vote at all — could be a crucial factor in deciding the presidential election on Jan. 13. About 70 percent of Taiwanese in their 20s and 30s voted in the 2020 presidential election, a lower share than among middle-aged and older voters, according to official data. People ages 20 to 34 count for a fifth of Taiwan’s population, government estimates show.“We’re tired of the divisions and wars of words between political parties,” said Shen Chih-hsiang, a biotechnology student from Kaohsiung, a city in the south that is traditionally a stronghold of the Democratic Progressive Party. He remained undecided on whom to support.“Instead of worrying about the politics of major powers that are hard to change,” said Mr. Shen, 25, “I am more concerned about whether I can get a job and afford a house after graduation.”The frustrations voiced by Taiwan’s voters have highlighted some of the issues that the next administration will be under pressure to address. Taiwan is renowned for its cutting-edge semiconductor industry. But many younger workers at smaller companies earn relatively low incomes, and inflation can eat into any small pay increases. Housing prices have risen in many cities.Vice President Lai Ching-te, the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate, has led in the polls for months. But his lead has narrowed over Hou Yu-ih, the candidate for the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. Ko Wen-je, the candidate for the Taiwan People’s Party, has slipped in recent polls but could still play a decisive role by drawing youth votes that might have once gone to Mr. Lai’s party.Ko Wen-je, the candidate for the Taiwan People’s Party, at a news conference in Taipei last month. He has slipped in recent polls but could still play a decisive role by drawing youth votes.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesTo increase the chances of an opposition victory, Mr. Hou and Mr. Ko had briefly discussed forming an alliance. But the talks fell apart in a spectacular fashion late last month.“So much of this youth support for Ko Wen-je is really driven not by actual admiration for the man and his policies, but by frustration,” said Lev Nachman, a political science professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. He cited focus group discussions he had with Taiwanese students.“This idea that the D.P.P. and K.M.T. are both equally bad seems to have taken hold among a lot of younger voters,” Professor Nachman said, referring to the two main parties.In a recent poll by My Formosa, an online magazine, 29 percent of respondents ages 20 to 29 said they supported Mr. Ko and his running mate, a fall from the previous survey, while 36 percent backed Mr. Lai. Other polls suggested a similar pattern, thought experts stressed those results could change in the final weeks of the race.The rumble of discontent did not mean that Taiwanese were dismissive about the risks of conflict with China, said Chang Yu-meng, the president of the Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy. The group had organized the presidential forum last month, where Mr. Lai and Mr. Ko answered questions from young voters.“I think young people are still highly concerned about international topics,” Mr. Chang said in an interview after the forum, citing relations with China as an example. “But apart from that, they are really concerned about a diversity of issues.”Chang Yu-meng, the president of the Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy, said young voters were concerned about a broad range of issues in addition to relations with China.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesWinning the election would be a watershed for the Democratic Progressive Party. Once a scrappy outsider, it was founded in 1986 as a wave of mass protests and democratic activism pushed the Nationalist Party to abandon authoritarian rule. Since Taiwan began direct presidential elections in 1996, no party has won more than two successive terms.The Democratic Progressive Party has tended to win most of the youth vote, but after two terms in power under President Tsai Ing-wen, it is no longer a fresh face. And many younger Taiwanese tend to see the opposition Nationalists as a party too caught in the past and too attached to China.“To young people in Taiwan now, the D.P.P. is the establishment,” said Shelley Rigger, a professor at Davidson College in North Carolina, who has long studied Taiwanese politics and conducted interviews with younger voters. “Whatever the D.P.P. was going to do for young people, they should have done by now. There’s a lot of youth dissatisfaction with the economy.”Mr. Ko, a surgeon and a former mayor of Taipei, has leaped into the space created by this discontent. He supported the Democratic Progressive Party earlier in his political ascent but formed the Taiwan People’s Party in 2019 as an alternative to the establishment. At rallies across the island, he has promised to solve housing and economic problems with a no-nonsense approach that he says he honed in hospital emergency wards. Mr. Ko and his supporters argue that he can also thaw relations with China.Jennifer Yo-yi Lee is one of the legislative candidates for the Taiwan People’s Party who is hoping to tap into voter frustration. “Young people are tired of the vicious battle between parties,” Ms. Lee said.Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times“Taiwan has been stagnant for too long, and it needs some changes,” said Hsieh Yu-ching, 20, who recently attended a youth rally held by Mr. Ko.Mr. Lai recently announced a series of youth policies, promising to improve the job opportunities and mitigate high housing costs. He also announced as his running mate Bi-khim Hsiao, who has been Taiwan’s representative in Washington for more than three years. Ms. Hsiao could lift enthusiasm for the Democratic Progressives, several experts said.“I also want to acknowledge the many domestic and social challenges that our young people are facing,” Ms. Hsiao said at a news conference last month. She promised to do more to address anxiety over jobs, housing and the environment.Vice President Lai Ching-te, the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate, center left, announced as his running mate Bi-khim Hsiao, who has been Taiwan’s representative in Washington.Carlos Garcia Rawlins/ReutersThe parties all face the hurdle of coaxing voters to turn up at the ballot box. Taiwan’s minimum voting age, 20, is higher than in many other democracies, and people must vote where they are officially registered as residents. For some voters, especially younger ones, that means a long trip back to their hometowns.Millie Lin, who works at a technology company in Taipei and hails from Tainan, at the other end of the island, said she had not decided whether to go home to vote on Jan. 13.“When I see the struggles between political parties,” she said, “I sometimes feel that my vote can’t change anything.” More

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    Can Taiwan Continue to Fight Off Chinese Disinformation?

    Ahead of a presidential election in January, Taiwanese fact checkers and watchdogs say they are ready for Beijing. But they are still worried.Suspicious videos that began circulating in Taiwan this month seemed to show the country’s leader advertising cryptocurrency investments.President Tsai Ing-wen, who has repeatedly risked Beijing’s ire by asserting her island’s autonomy, appeared to claim in the clips that the government helped develop investment software for digital currencies, using a term that is common in China but rarely used in Taiwan. Her mouth appeared blurry and her voice unfamiliar, leading Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau to deem the video to be almost certainly a deepfake — an artificially generated spoof — and potentially one created by Chinese agents.For years, China has pummeled the Taiwanese information ecosystem with inaccurate narratives and conspiracy theories, seeking to undermine its democracy and divide its people in an effort to assert control over its neighbor. Now, as fears over Beijing’s growing aggression mount, a new wave of disinformation is heading across the strait separating Taiwan from the mainland before the pivotal election in January.Perhaps as much as any other place, however, the tiny island is ready for the disinformation onslaught.Taiwan has built a resilience to foreign meddling that could serve as a model to the dozens of other democracies holding votes in 2024. Its defenses include one of the world’s most mature communities of fact checkers, government investments, international media literacy partnerships and, after years of warnings about Chinese intrusion, a public sense of skepticism.The challenge now is sustaining the effort.“That is the main battlefield: The fear, uncertainty, doubt is designed to keep us up at night so we don’t respond to novel threats with novel defenses,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s inaugural digital minister, who works on strengthening cybersecurity defenses against threats like disinformation. “The main idea here is just to stay agile.”Taiwan, a highly online society, has repeatedly been found to be the top target in the world for disinformation from foreign governments, according to the Digital Society Project, a research initiative exploring the internet and politics. China was accused of spreading rumors during the pandemic about the Taiwanese government’s handling of Covid-19, researchers said. Representative Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island as speaker of the House last year set off a series of high-profile cyberattacks, as well as a surge of debunked online messages and images that fact checkers linked to China.For all of Beijing’s efforts, however, it has struggled to sway public opinion.In recent years, Taiwan’s voters have chosen a president, Ms. Tsai, from the Democratic Progressive Party, which the Communist Party views as an obstacle to its goal of unification. Experts and local fact checkers said Chinese disinformation campaigns were a major concern in local elections in 2018; the efforts seemed less effective in 2020, when Ms. Tsai recaptured the presidency in a landslide. Her vice president, Lai Ching-te, has maintained a polling lead in the race to succeed her.China has denied interloping, instead saying it is the “top victim of disinformation.”News about the presidential race on a television in a Taipei noodle restaurant. Many Taiwanese have internal “warning bells” for disinformation, a founder of a group called Fake News Cleaner said.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesMs. Tsai has repeatedly addressed her government’s push to combat Beijing’s disinformation campaign, as well as criticism that her strategy aims to stifle speech from political opponents. At a defense conference this month, she said: “We let the public have knowledge and tools that refute and report false or misleading information, and maintain a cautious balance between maintaining information freely and refusing information manipulation.”Many Taiwanese have developed internal “warning bells” for suspicious narratives, said Melody Hsieh, who co-founded Fake News Cleaner, a group focused on information literacy education. Her group has 22 lecturers and 160 volunteers teaching anti-disinformation tactics at universities, temples, fishing villages and elsewhere in Taiwan, sometimes using gifts like handmade soap to motivate participants.The group is part of a robust collective of similar Taiwanese operations. There is Cofacts, whose fact-checking service is integrated into a popular social media app called Line. Doublethink Lab was directed until this month by Puma Shen, a professor who testified this year before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent agency of the U.S. government. MyGoPen is named after a homophone in the Taiwanese dialect for “don’t fool me again.”Taiwan’s anti-disinformation groups include Doublethink Lab, formerly led by Puma Shen.Chiangying-Ying/Associated PressMascots at the entrance of the Taiwan Fact Check Center in Taipei.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesCitizens have sought out fact-checking help, such as when a recent uproar over imported eggs raised questions about videos showing black and green yolks, Ms. Hsieh said. Such demand would have been unthinkable in 2018, when the heated emotions and damaging rumors around a contentious referendum inspired the founders of Fake News Cleaner.“Now, everyone will stop and think: ‘This seems odd. Can you help me check this? We suspect something,’” Ms. Hsieh said. “This, I think, is an improvement.”Still, fact-checking in Taiwan remains complicated. False claims swirled recently around Mr. Lai, an outspoken critic of Beijing, and his visit to Paraguay this summer. Fact checkers found that a memo at the center of one claim had been manipulated, with changed dates and dollar figures. Another claim originated on an English-language forum before a new X account quoted it in Mandarin in a post that was shared by a news website in Hong Kong and boosted on Facebook by a Taiwanese politician.China’s disinformation work has had “measurable effects,” including “worsening Taiwanese political and social polarization and widening perceived generational divides,” according to research from the RAND Corporation. Concerns about election-related fake news drove the Taiwanese government last month to set up a dedicated task force.A banner in Taipei depicts Sun Yat Sen, the first president of the Republic of China, and Taiwan’s flag.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesTaiwan “has historically been Beijing’s testing ground for information warfare,” with China using social media to interfere in Taiwanese politics since at least 2016, according to RAND. In August, Meta took down a Chinese influence campaign that it described as the largest such operation to date, with 7,704 Facebook accounts and hundreds of others across other social media platforms targeting Taiwan and other regions.Beijing’s disinformation strategy continues to shift. Fact checkers noted that Chinese agents were no longer distracted by pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, as they were during the last presidential election in Taiwan. Now, they have access to artificial intelligence that can generate images, audio and video — “potentially a dream come true for Chinese propagandists,” said Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, a RAND researcher.A few months ago, an audio file that seemed to feature a rival politician criticizing Mr. Lai circulated in Taiwan. The clip was almost certainly a deepfake, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice and the A.I.-detection company Reality Defender.Chinese disinformation posts appear increasingly subtle and organic, rather than flooding the zone with obvious pro-Beijing messages, researchers said. Some false narratives are created by Chinese-controlled content farms, then spread by agents, bots or unwitting social media users, researchers say. China has also tried to buy established Taiwanese social media accounts and may have paid Taiwanese influencers to promote pro-Beijing narratives, according to RAND.Disinformation that directly addressed relations between China and Taiwan grew rarer from 2020 to 2022, the Taiwan Fact Check Center said last month. Instead, Chinese agents seemed to focus more on stoking social division within Taiwan by spreading lies about local services and health issues. Sometimes, other experts said, questionable posts about medical remedies and celebrity gossip guided viewers to conspiracy theories about Taiwanese politics.The ever-present menace, which the Taiwanese government calls “cognitive warfare,” has led to several aggressive attempts at a crackdown. One unsuccessful proposal last year, modeled after regulations in Europe, would have imposed labeling and transparency requirements on social media platforms and forced them to comply with court-ordered content removal requests.Critics denounced the government’s anti-disinformation campaign as a political witch hunt, raising the specter of the island’s not-so-distant authoritarian past. Some have pointed out that Taiwan’s media ecosystem, with its diverse political leanings, often produces pro-Beijing content that can be misattributed to Chinese manipulation.At an event in June, President Tsai stressed that “well-funded, large-scale disinformation campaigns” were “one of the most difficult challenges,” pitting Taiwanese citizens against one another and corroding trust in democratic institutions. Disinformation defense, she said, must be “a whole-of-society effort.”Fact checkers and watchdog groups said public apathy was a concern — research suggests that Taiwanese people make limited use of fact-checking resources in past elections — as was the risk of being spread too thin.“There’s mountains of disinformation,” said Eve Chiu, the chief executive of the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which has around 10 fact checkers working each day. “We can’t do it all.”From left, Lu Hong-yu, Lee Tzu-ying and Cheng Hsu-yu placed third as a team in a Taiwan fact-checking competition.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesAttempts to increase interest in media literacy have included a nationwide campaign, “humor over rumor,” which leveraged jokey meme culture and a cute dog character to debunk false narratives. In September, the Taiwan FactCheck Center also held a national virtual competition for youths that drew students like Lee Tzu-ying, Cheng Hsu-yu and Lu Hong-yu.The three civics classmates, who finished in third place, acknowledged that Taiwan’s raucous politics allowed disinformation to breed confusion and chaos. Their Taiwanese peers, however, have learned caution.“If you see something new, but don’t know if it is true or false, you need to verify it,” Ms. Lee, 16, said. “I just want to know the truth — that’s very important to me.” More