![#ShannonBrandao, #ChinaBoss: The First Nail-Biter Election Of 2024: Taiwan [On January 13th...]](/content/images/size/w800/2023/12/1703505960311.jpg)
Shannon Brandao
Shannon's excerpt from the article: "Politico [excerpt]: 2024 will be a bumper year of #elections around the world, but one of the first votes on the calendar will also be one of the most hotly contested and consequential: #Taiwan, where there are vital strategic interests at play for both the U.S. and #China on January 13.
If the campaign started with expectations in the U.S. that the ruling, pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), whose top brass are frequent and welcome guests in Washington, would stroll to victory, the final stages of the presidential and legislative race have turned into a nail-biter.
Chinese President’s #XiJinping’s Communist Party leadership, increasingly assertive in its claim that democratic Taiwan is part of China and keen to see the ruling party in Taipei ousted, is trying to swing the election through a #disinformation campaign of hoaxes and outlandish claims on social media.
And the tactics may be working. The latest polls for the first-past-the-post presidential race on the My Formosa portal have DPP leader William Lai on 35.2 percent, only just keeping his nose out in front of his main challenger from the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT), Hou Yu-ih, on 30.6 percent. On Tuesday, the Beijing-leaning United Daily News put both candidates on 31 percent.
'This is not a walk in the park,' admitted Vincent Chao, a city councillor and prominent DPP personality, speaking to POLITICO’s Power Play podcast at a campaign event in New Taipei, a municipality surrounding the capital.
It could hardly be a more febrile period in terms of security fears over the Taiwan Strait, where insistent Chinese maneuvering has been matched by a high-stakes U.S.-backed boost to the island’s defenses. Only on December 15, the U.S. approved another $300 million of spending on defense kit, sparking a retort from China that the expenditure would harm 'security interests and threaten peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.'
Lai’s opponents are playing hard on these security implications of the vote, and are accusing him of bringing the island closer to conflict because of his past comments in favor of the island’s independence. China has, after all, continually warned that independence 'means war' and Xi has said Beijing is willing to use 'all necessary measures' to secure unification. Lai has hit back that his rivals 'are parroting the [Chinese Communist Party line] as #propaganda to score electoral benefits.'
...Chao is candid about the scale of China’s social media offensive.
'What we’re seeing is a much more sophisticated China,' Chao reflected.
'They’ve grown much more confident in their abilities to influence our elections, not through military coercion or other overt means, but through disinformation, through influencing public opinion, through controlling the information that people see … through social media organizations like #TikTok.'"
#news #geopolitics