Curated from FSI - Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies — Here’s what matters right now:
Taiwan: Presidential Election 2020 Scene Setter Ari Chasnoff Mon, 08/26/2019 - 16:17 Authors News Type News Date Mon, 08/26/2019 - 12:00 Paragraphs This is the first of a series of pieces we intend to publish on societies and elections at risk from online disinformation. Our goal is to draw the attention of the media, tech platforms and other academics to these risks and to provide a basic background that could be useful to those who wish to study the information environment in these areas. Political context On Saturday, January 11, 2020, Taiwanese citizens will vote for their next president. The contest is between the candidates of two parties: Tsai Ing-Wen, incumbent president and a member of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Han Kuo-Yu, the challenger representing the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT). While the focus of Stanford Internet Observatory’s project is the upcoming Taiwanese election, we begin with a brief summary of the historical context of these political parties. From 1945-1949, following Japan’s defeat at the end of WWII and its handover of Taiwan, the Nationalist Party (KMT) was briefly the de facto government of both China and Taiwan. However, the KMT was defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Chinese Civil War, and in 1949 the KMT government fled to Taiwan. At that point, both the KMT government (in exile) and the CCP government in Beijing claimed to be the legitimate government of China, as the countries of the world split on what entity to recognize as the rightful leaders of China. In 1971, Taiwan was expelled from the United Nations, and the CCP was recognized as the ruling government of China in the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council. The Taiwanese government remained largely a single-party entity until 1987, when it lifted martial law and allowed competing political parties to emerge. The most significant of these was the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which in 2000 became the first opposition party to win the presidency. The DPP has controlled the presidency since 2016. Taiwan's major social cleavages line up with the KMT / DPP party divide, and reflect Taiwan’s history as a territory distinct from the Chinese core provinces; it has robust ethnic diversity produced by immigration from both mainland China and the rest of Asia Pacific, and with the exception of the period from 1945-49 the island has been ruled by a distinct government since 1895. The KMT is dominated by Han Chinese who arrived with the KMT in 1949 from the mainland, are concentrated in the north. They speak Mandarin, have a history of dominating government positions, and have benefited the most from state-led economic programs and trade with China. The DPP is dominated by pre-1949 native Taiwanese who are concentrated in the southern half of the island, are ethnically Hoklo and Hakka and thus speak Hoklo and Hakka instead of Mandarin, and have historically been excluded from government and state-led econ
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Original reporting: FSI - Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies