CHINA WATCHGet Ready to Meet the Next President of Taiwan
In Taiwan, the main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), has announced that Hou You-yi is its candidate for the January 2024 presidential election. The KMT declined to hold a vote of its membership and instead party chairman Chu Li-lun chose the party’s candidate directly. Hou’s rival is Taiwan’s vice president, Lai Ching-te, from the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
In Taiwan, the main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), has announced that Hou You-yi is its candidate for the 2024 presidential election. The decision comes after a very public campaign for the candidacy by Terry Guo, the billionaire founder and chairman of the Foxconn electronics manufacturing group. The KMT declined to hold a vote of its membership and instead party chairman Chu Li-lun chose the party’s candidate directly.
Hou You-yi is mayor of New Taipei City (known as Taipei County until it was upgraded to city status in 2010). Before that, Hou had a long and storied career as a police officer, rising to head Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau in 2003.
He was involved in the attempt to arrest democracy activist Deng Nan-jung in 1989 at the offices of the dissident magazine Freedom Era Weekly, and several months later Deng self-immolated to protest authoritarianism in Taiwan. Hou was also placed in command of the investigation into the attempted assassination of former president Chen Shui-bian during the 2004 presidential election.
Hou’s rival is Lai Ching-te from the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Lai is currently vice president of Taiwan and unsuccessfully challenged President Tsai Ing-wen in a DPP presidential primary in 2019. Tsai went on to score a crushing win against the KMT in the 2020 election. However, Tsai can’t run for a third term, and Lai faced no challengers in the DPP for 2024.
Lai has a background in public health and a master’s from Harvard University. He began his political career as a legislator in the 1990s before serving as a very popular mayor of Tainan, a DPP stronghold, in the 2010s. He joined the Tsai government as premier in 2017.
The third candidate in the election is the former mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je. Ko has a celebrated medical background in critical and emergency care and transplant surgery. He was first elected mayor in 2014, against the KMT and other independents, and re-elected in 2018.
In 2019, Ko founded his own political party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), which shares its name but not its politics with the party founded in 1927 by Chiang Wei-shui, Cai Pei-huo and other leading figures of the time. In a very divisive political landscape, the TPP aims to occupy the center ground with an emphasis on non-partisan governance, but Ko is also known for his public gaffes and political naivety.
