Tycoon’s political plunge

Terry Gou is hoping to do a Donald Trump. As Taiwan heads to the polls in January 2024 for an election that carries enormous political significance for the island’s future amid increasing tensions with China, the 72-year-old billionaire founder of Foxconn, the electronics manufacturing giant, jumped into the fray last month.

Mr. Gou’s pitch to Taiwanese voters, in some respects, is not very different from what Mr. Trump put forth in 2016: promising economic competence that, he argues, only he can provide leveraging his considerable business experience. “I am the only entrepreneur with the practical management skills,” he declared when announcing his run on August 28. “I am an entrepreneur with nearly five decades of practical experience. Who else is better suited to lead Taiwan’s political sphere?”

Taking a shot at President Tsai Ing-wen and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), whose candidate Lai Ching-te remains the frontrunner in the polls by some distance, Mr. Gou has blamed the current government for bringing the economy to “the edge of a cliff” and for not handling relations with China better. “I will not allow Taiwan to become the next Ukraine,” he said, promising to bring “50 years of peace”.

But will Taiwanese voters buy the pitch?

Mr. Gou was born in 1950 in a small town outside Taipei, and his parents, as was the case for many Taiwanese of his generation, had lived in the Chinese mainland before the civil war. His father fought for the Kuomintang (KMT) and fled along with Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan after their defeat to the Communist Party in 1949.

At the age of 24, he founded the Hon Hai Technology Group, which is today the world’s biggest electronics manufacturer and is, of course, more widely known as Foxconn.

In 1988, he opened his first factory on the mainland in Shenzhen. The following decade saw a watershed moment for Foxconn as it bagged a major contract with Compaq. Other orders would follow with companies such as IBM and Apple. Foxconn’s stunning rise coincided with China’s emergence as a lynchpin in global supply chains, giving Mr. Gou’s company a global footprint.

Own appeal

Mr. Gou had for long toyed with a political run, and whether he would finally take the plunge had been a point of debate throughout 2023. His best bet was to secure the backing of the main opposition KMT, but the party ended up choosing the mayor of New Taipei Hou Yu-ih as its candidate for 2024, dealing Mr. Gou’s ambitions a major blow. He will now have to run on the back of his own appeal without the considerable political machinery of the KMT.

According to opinion polls released on September 24, the KMT’s Mr. Hou and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) candidate Ko Wen-je are polling at 19% and 23%, respectively, trailing the front-runner, Mr. Lai of the DPP, who is polling at 30%. Mr. Gou remains off the pace by some distance, at around 14%. His immediate challenge is to secure, by early November, the 2,89,000 signatures that are needed for an independent candidate to contest.

If Mr. Gou’s message with a focus on economics and repairing cross-strait relations is on one side of the political spectrum, on the other is the DPP’s pitch of continuing to advocate for preserving Taiwan’s identity on the world’s stage and to ensure the current status quo is maintained.

Mr. Lai has strongly warned against Mr. Gou’s proposals for a “peace agreement” with Beijing, pointing to the fate of Hong Kong, which, for many in Taiwan, has underlined that a similar “one country, two systems” model would be unworkable and would not guarantee Taiwan’s democratic freedoms. Beijing, meanwhile, continues to flex its military might and has in September sent record numbers of aircraft across the median of the Taiwan Strait.

The fate of Mr. Gou’s campaign, which faces a tall order but has his deep pockets to turn to in the crucial next three months, will also provide a broader indicator of how Taiwanese view their political future as well as relations with China as the island goes to the polls in January.