Did DPP support just collapse in Taiwan?

A stunning 24-0 rebuke to the DDP’s Grand Recall efforts exposed the softness of pan-Green support…and the unexpected shift of the TPP towards China

Sometimes the big turning points in politics are only visible in retrospect. Sometimes, you are walloped in the moment. I believe a pretty seismic shift just happened in Taiwan, and we might all need to scramble to update our priors.

I wish I had been more bold in calling this, because I’d look like a genius now. But I think what happened is the upstart Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), which is generally more hawkish on China than the KMT and more dovish than the DPP, just broke on the pro-China side in a totally unexpected way. I’m a TPP supporter. I saw the pro-China TPP influencers coming up months ago. Heck, I’m a living example of the shift. But I wasn’t certain enough to generalize my experiences to to the whole party. Well they all showed up to the polls to hand the DPP the L at the recall election. And in the aftermath of that victory, the TPP have Gone Wild.

Like, many many Green to White voters who never could have joined the KMT because it’s “too pro-China” are going around saying “I’m a proud Chinese! Taiwan and China are families on both sides of the straits! Taiwan is China! China China China CHINA!!!”

To use a US-centric example…imagine if disaffected Democrats who can’t bring themselves to join the Republican Party because it’s too socially conservative started a third way party…only for that party to go more TradCath than the Pope overnight. What happened! Here are some of my ideas of what got the TPP to swing all the way the other way, although some of them might have caused median voter types to vote “no” in the recall as well.

The DPP went to the “Resist China and Protect Taiwan” well one time too many

Ever since the Sunflower movement the DPP have rallied voters to the polls by playing the China card. People forget, but Tsai Ing-wen was on track to lose her re-election in 2020 to the KMT’s Han Guo-yu until 2019’s Hong Kong pro-democracy protests and its subsequent crackdown heightened everybody’s awareness of the China threat.

But Taiwanese dissatisfaction over bread-and-butter issues only mounted and the DPP has been completely unsatisfactory on this front. This has caused a pipeline of DPP to TPP support amongst the young voters. As a common saying that just became popular goes, “I’m too young to remember how much the KMT sucked, but I’ve witnessed the DPP sucking all my life.”

The fact that the DPP went after every KMT legislator they could and didn’t differentiate between them even though many were newly-minted legislators who haven’t even spent a year in office before they were voted in undermined the legitimacy of the the recall efforts. Instead, it was kind of made into a referendum on cross-straits issues: all KMT legislators were smeared as pandahugging collaborators. It was a bridge too far.

The Bluebirds were very annoying and cringe

It seems to me like Taiwan never got a scrap of peace after President Lai Ching-te was elected. First you had the most brawls in the legislature I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. Then you had the Bluebird protests. Then, not even half a year from when he took office, the recall battles began.

Everywhere you went you went you had gaggles of recall petitioners asking for your signature to recall horrible KMT legislators. At the street corner, at the traditional market, online, offline…they were inescapable and persistant…and cringe.

The KMT used to be the out-of-touch party in Taiwan. But as the main force of the DPP aged into elder millennials and young people increasingly broke for TPP, they developed their own cringe that was somehow worse because they aren’t even properly old. It’s cutesy cringe. Here…just take a look at their viral dance routine for the recall…clipped into a mocking compilation by some DPP haters.

Being confronted with this kind of energy day after day for months can really wear on one’s sanity. I believe the problem is the party kept the recall efforts somehow at arms length, claiming that they were independent grassroots efforts spearheaded by various civic action groups. This was both hilariously implausible and meant the party couldn’t directly support and discipline the recall efforts.

The Bluebird-driven movement got to be a bit weird and culty internally I think. Kind of reminiscent of MAGA or Mao’s Red Guards. One of the reason why the recall loss was so unexpected is because they bullied so many into silence. There were multiple videos of incredibly milquetoasty KMT Freshman legislator Yeh Yuan-zhi getting physically bullied by pro-recall activists. It might have directly led to his surviving the recall elections by a razor-thin margin.

Ko Wen-je is still held incommunicado and his base thinks he’s railroaded

TPP supporters holding vigil outside of where Ko Wen-je is held incommunicado

This is too complicated an issue to get into at depth here. But in short, the TPP base believes that the DPP has mobilized their influence on the justice system to come after TPP and KMT leaders on spurious charges.

I report, you decide. TPP founder and Chairman Ko Wen-je has been held incommunicado for about 10 months now. If it gets to the one-year mark, which it might, he would be the the person held incommunicado before the conclusion of their first trial for the longest amount of time since the end of martial law.

I can’t tell you if Ko is guilty or not. But the prosecutor has got no smoking-gun evidence despite leaking stuff all over the place and the sight of an old man chained to a wheelchair to get medical treatment or only allowed to attend part of his father’s funeral stirred incredible outrage in his supporters. I don’t think the prosecutors ever made a good case for why Ko is denied bail while the trial proceeds.

The TPP doesn’t have the KMT’s political baggage

I congratulated a KMT friend for the recall results. “What’s there to congratulate? The KMT did nothing to merit celebration. Just the DPP over-reached and some TPP-ers willing to say they’re Chinese.”

I asked him why the KMT — official name “Chinese Kuomingtang” btw — have been so shy about self-identifying as Chinese these days.

He sighed. Basically, the deal is both the KMT and DPP are actually pro-American parties above all. “For decades, our party derived its legitimacy from being anti-China and pro-America. We aligned all our messaging to American values. We even sourced all our elites from western-educated Taiwanese with kids, properties and businesses in America.”

This creates a weird asymmetry where the US can switch their preference between the KMT and DPP at will, but the KMT will have a hard time breaking from the American narrative…even if it is being smeared by that very narrative as being too pro-China right now.

“We couldn’t go there…but the TPP as a young party doesn’t have the baggage. They could turn on a dime.”

When you add the KMT and TPP votes, they beat DPP together. And the TPP just opened the Overton window to supporting China that the KMT never could have achieved on their own.

Allow me to be so bold…

Since I was too timid in predicting the TPP’s turn to China, allow me to be more bold now in predicting the DPP is going to be taking L after L’s for quite a while in Taiwanese politics. Certainly, the August 23rd batch of another 7 recall elections is going not go very badly for them. I predict another goose egg.

An avalanche of criticism have been unleashed over them since the loss in the recall elections. I think privately all of us have built up so much grievance against the bluebirds and the DDP. But somehow we felt like we were isolated and alone. The results of the recall votes proved that we are actually the majority of Taiwanese. It’s the Bluebirds that are crazy.

Part of the joy of going around saying “We are so CHINESE” is because for so long the DPP have made it politically impossible to say. They’ve fostered a “Taiwanese not Chinese” framework that kind of kidnapped all of Taiwanese politics and subsumed all other issues to “resist China and protect Taiwan.”

Once we realized we didn’t have to be politically correct, it was like the breaking of a dam.

I don’t know. Maybe in time the TPP will swing back to being more hawkish on China eventually. But we are having a pandahugging jamboree right now. You have to understand. TPP-ers are kind of obsessed with basic infrastructure. And we look at the incredible buildout in China with covetous jealousy. Taiwan has become one of those places infected with the late-stage liberal democratic cancer of not being able to get things done on time and competently.

We prefer democracy. But when we feel like the DPP doesn’t play fair and deliver results, we are going to turn to China and notice… “hey…at least they have good infrastructure.”

And nuclear power plants! A TPP-sponsored referendum will be held on 8/23 alongside the remaining 7 recalls. Let’s hope it’s a YES to nuclear energy life extension and NO on all the recalls!