On Politics

Last time I witnessed an election abroad was in 2016 in the USA. My whole suite sat in front of the TV that evening as the moderators on CNN, with mounting desperation, pinned their increasingly delusional hopes on an ever-shrinking number of uncounted votes in Florida. What an awful time.

My experience watching the Taiwanese elections unfurl was quite different. One would be forgiven for thinking election day was just like any other weekend afternoon; it seemed nothing was happening at all. A few rallies had taken place during the week, but by and large, the streets were calm that afternoon, there were hardly any displays of partisanship, and everyone calmly carried about their business.

That evening, as the polls closed, every foreigner in Taiwan sat down before their computer to cram in all the information they would need to process the outcomes. I myself found some quite interesting information. It is well known to all foreigners living in Taiwan that a typical KMT voter is older, a speaker of Mandarin, and a descendant of the mainlanders arrived in the 1940s. Conversely, the DPP base of support largely comprises young people, speakers of Hokkien, and people whose families have lived in Taiwan for as long as hundreds of years.

It is less well known, though, that indigenous Taiwanese people have their own set number of delegates and tend to heavily favour the KMT. It has been argued that these voters fear an independent Han Chinese ethno-state in Taiwan, and also harbour resentment against the Chinese who have been settled in Taiwan for a long time and form the ranks of the DPP.

One fact about the elections that surprised many a first-time watcher was the complexity of the election process. The elections included both the presidential elections and the legislative elections, and the legislative elections used the method of parallel voting: essentially, voters filled out two ballots, voting for a party on a national level on one, and choosing a representative for their own constituency on another (to illustrate the importance of constituencies, the KMT received fewer than half as many seats as the DPP won, despite trailing the DPP only 40.6% to 45.6%).

Coming back to school, it was interesting to see how, in contrast to the enormous polarisation in the US, political views at ICLP varied quite significantly from teacher to teacher. I think the majority of our teachers voted for the DPP, but there were not few who voted for the KMT – one of my teachers said she was indebted to the KMT as her family had come over with it in 1949, and another spoke of trying not to pick fights with China.