Since a week ago, Thailand once again has a businessman, Srettha Thavisin, at the head of the government, instead of a general. In Taiwan, no less accustomed to military marches, the tune is also heard that “the time has come for a government of entrepreneurs”.
At least this is what the founder of Foxconn, Terry Gou, postulates with his candidacy to preside over the archipelago, presented on Monday. Gou, one of the six largest fortunes on the island, summed up what drives him to run: “I will not allow Taiwan to become the next Ukraine.”
“The government of the last seven years”, added Gou, “has placed Taiwan’s security, foreign relations and economy on the edge of the abyss”. The septuagenarian presents himself as a guarantor of “fifty years of peace”, in a clear bid to improve relations with Beijing.
Gou’s candidacy for the January elections must gather 290,000 signatures in 45 days. He will then compete with Lai Ching Te, the vice-president of the Democratic Progressive Party – the current president, Tsai Ing-wen, is completing her second term – and, within the same anti-independence camp, with the former mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen Je and New Taipei City Mayor Hou Yu Ih, a former police chief running for the historic Kuomintang.
It should be noted that Gou left the reins of Foxconn four years ago, precisely to try to win the primaries of the party of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. However, he finished second.
Foxconn’s semiconductors, which Gou founded half a century ago, are today vital to leading companies from Apple to Sony. Precisely for this reason, Gou has simultaneously maintained a more than fluid relationship with the Chinese leaders on the other side of the strait. It was a pioneer in the 1980s when it opened a factory in Shenzhen – today bigger than Hong Kong – and for many years no foreign company has paid as many wages in the People’s Republic of China as Foxconn (legally, Hon Hai): up to a one million two hundred thousand.
Therefore, Gou has an objective interest in maintaining peace between the two political entities that over the course of three quarters of a century have claimed to be the real China. For this reason, he accuses the current Taiwanese government of exacerbating tensions with Beijing and bringing the two Chinas – Taiwan’s official name is the Republic of China – to one step of war.
In the belligerent camp there would also be US congressmen like Seth Moulton, who three months ago set off the alarms on the island by threatening, from Los Angeles, Beijing: “If they invade Taiwan, we will bomb TSMC”, acronym of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. A US Defense adviser reproached him that this would paralyze the global electronics industry, at a cost of trillions of dollars.
The outburst of the Democrat Moulton – a veteran of the invasion of Iraq – also did not amuse Taiwanese Defense Minister General Chiu Kuo-cheng, who recalled that the duty of the armed forces was to protect strategic assets and that he would not allow anyone to bombard them.
It is also true that Chinese President Xi Jinping has been marking Beijing’s traditional red lines with increasingly thick brushes. The air-naval maneuvers of the People’s Army around Taiwan – the last two weekends ago, putting Japanese and Taiwanese fighters on guard – do not leave much room for the imagination as to what would happen if the Republic of China declared independence.
Something that would explode the understanding of “one China” and its derivative, “one country, two systems”. The questioning of which by part of the population reached its peak just before the pandemic in Hong Kong, without ever settling in Macau.
The Taiwanese opposition, which won the 2022 municipal elections, believes that Gou’s candidacy is dividing them, to the benefit of Lai, the vice president who, with his recent visit to Paraguay, provoked the latest escalation with Beijing , after stops in New York and San Francisco.
