THE RISK REPORT BY IAN BREMMER
IN JANUARY, TAIWAN WILL HOLD a presidential election. China’s leaders hope former New Taipei City mayor Hou Yu-ih, candidate of the Kuomintang opposition party, will win the job, but the smart money is on current Vice President William Lai, who represents the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Lai and his party favor a tougher approach to Beijing. If Lai wins, Beijing will become much more confrontational in the coming months. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan remains highly unlikely, but a deterioration in relations is bad news for both sides.
For now, Beijing is wielding both sticks and carrots to influence Taiwan’s voters. China’s navy recently conducted its largest-ever military exercises in the western Pacific, but Beijing has also announced a plan to develop China’s Fujian province into a “demonstration zone” for integrated economic development with Taiwan.
This good cop, bad cop strategy probably won’t work. Recent polling suggests that about three-quarters of Taiwan’s 24 million people now consider themselves Taiwanese rather than Chinese, whatever their family history—a sharp jump over the past 10 years. Some of that trend is likely the natural product of generational change. But China’s crackdown on the democracy-rights move-r ment in Hong Kong in 2020 has played a role in that shift too.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s DPP leaders are looking beyond the election toward the more threatening approach from China. Their latest pushback comes in the form of a new defense report they hope will make China think harder about a future invasion. On Sept. 12, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense released its National Defense Report 2023, which details
