It is truly remarkable how intense the political games being played to be in position to run for top offices in the 2026 local elections already is this far out. Previous columns have examined the northern and southern metropolises and this will explore Taichung, which is shaping up quite differently.
Briefly, however, let us examine a few new developments outside of Taichung. Once one of the brightest of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) stars, former Taoyuan mayor and vice premier Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) has continued to dominate headlines. He has been jailed ahead of his trial and has lost all party rights and privileges for three years and will be expelled from the party if found guilty, and yet a Taoyuan city councilor is already building a campaign for Cheng to run for mayor of New Taipei City. We will be examining the Cheng situation in an upcoming column.
In Kaohsiung, after being tipped as a “great dark horse” candidate by former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) on his radio talk show Smile Taiwan, legislator Chiu Yi-ying (邱議瑩) came on to the show and confirmed she was “seriously considering it” and “moving in that direction.” After losing their default candidate to a scandal involving a Chinese mistress, the DPP now has four or five viable candidates with no obvious frontrunner.
Photo: Chen Chih-chu, Taipei Times
WHO WILL THE DPP RUN IN TAICHUNG?
Three possibilities for the DPP candidate come to mind, but which has the edge or is even interested in running is unclear. Lawmaker Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) is one of the most powerful figures in the legislature and he previously served as deputy speaker when the party held a majority.
He is also known as a heavyweight in the New Tide faction, the most powerful of the DPP factions. This is the same faction that DPP party chair and President William Lai (賴清德) hails from, though Lai claims to have resigned from the faction after winning the election. Being a semi-secret organization, however, it is unclear what that even means.
Photo: Oh Su-mei, Taipei Times
Tsai is also the commissioner of the unfortunately-named Chinese Professional Baseball League. Coincidentally, current Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) is widely known to be one of the politicians most crazy about baseball, and her Instagram feed frequently features her at games rooting for our Taichung-based CTBC Brothers.
However, when Tsai ran for mayor in 2022 he only managed to get 39 percent of the vote and in spite of being very popular in his largely rural Taichung 1 district, he failed to leave much of an impact on the rest of the city.
If the DPP can win back a majority in the legislature in 2028, he would be in line for speaker, known more formally but confusingly as the President of the Legislative Yuan. It is possible he may prefer to hold out for that rather than risk another humiliating landslide defeat.
Photo courtesy of Tsai Pi-run
Another possibility is lawmaker Ho Hsin-chun (何欣純), who does not appear to be in any DPP faction. She has recently been roaming the streets in districts outside of her own and getting more press attention.
In spite of living in Taichung myself and doing the central Taiwan news on ICRT radio, Ho has left no impression on me at all. The only interesting details I could find about her is she is a cousin to the Chthonic frontman and former lawmaker Freddy Lim (林昶佐), and she got a master’s degree in women’s studies at the University of York in the UK, so presumably her English is good.
If he does not run in New Taipei City or Taoyuan, it is possible that former Keelung mayor and minister of the interior Lin Yu-chang (林佑錩) could have a go in Taichung, but his name recognition is far higher in the north, so this seems unlikely.
WHO WILL THE KMT RUN?
By almost all normal internal Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) political standards and norms, current deputy speaker of the legislature and former KMT party chair Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) should have this nomination locked down. However, there is some talk of Taichung lawmaker Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔) considering a run.
Aside from being seven years younger than Yang, Chiang outranks her in every other way in the party and the legislature. As party chair Chiang got a reputation for being light blue and even made an attempt at dropping the “1992 consensus” from the KMT party platform, but was abandoned under pressure.
Chiang was elected party chair in a by-election, and by party tradition these chairs are viewed more as caretakers than “real” full-term chairs. Distrusted in Beijing, he was the only party chair in recent memory to not be congratulated by the Chinese Communist Party. His efforts to bring the party closer to the center of public opinion largely failed, though.
In 2018 he was widely expected to win the KMT Taichung mayoral primary, but when the polls were complete he lost to Lu by a fraction of a percentage point. To everyone’s surprise, Chiang did not dispute the result and even ran Lu’s campaign.
Incidentally, there is an outside chance that Chiang losing that primary was my fault. In the total number of people polled, Lu only got about two dozen more people. During the primary, I was covering an environmental rally attended by thousands of people. Lu worked the crowd, but Chiang spent around half an hour with me, at the time the Taichung American Chamber of Commerce chair, having a very nerdy discussion on Taichung transportation policy.
Chiang got both his master’s degree and doctorate at American universities and speaks decent English. In 2016 he easily won re-election in his legislative district in a year with a DPP landslide, while Yang was defeated in my current district by the New Power Party’s Hung Tzu-yung (洪慈庸), though Yang won the seat back in a three-way race in 2020.
Yang is the epitome of a local warhorse lawmaker and local patronage faction politician, and for a time was one of the deputy mayors. It is unclear to me why there is so much speculation about her running, but locally the press is playing it up.
Both are Taichung Red Faction, so there may be some internal factional reasons that are opaque to outsiders in Yang running. Chiang is widely known to not take much interest in factional affairs, so the faction may be more keen on backing her. Having cooperated in the past, it would not be surprising if the Taichung Black Faction would be willing to back her on the assumption that she would be more congenial to their interests.
Chiang, like the DPP’s Tsai, may also harbor ambitions of taking over the speaker’s chair in the legislature, and could be focused more on that, though Taichung mayor would probably be better for his career long term if he has aspirations to run for president.
AND HOW ABOUT THE TPP?
There have been three potential Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) candidates bandied about to run for Taichung mayor. The one that seems most unlikely is former Taipei mayor and TPP party chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲).
For a period earlier this year the press ran a lot of speculation on this, perhaps because he did well in Taichung, especially in areas around the science park. As Taiwan’s second-largest city by population and Taipei only ranking fourth, in theory going from Taipei mayor to Taichung mayor is an upgrade.
Of course no one would see it that way, as Taipei is the capital and the center of the press world, and Taichung is viewed as a far-away second city. Also, Ko has presidential ambitions and is not very familiar with the city.
Former legislator and current advisor to the Taichung City Government Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) has high name recognition, but has had a rough relationship with Ko (柯文哲) recently, though Ko appears to have offered an olive branch. However, images purporting to show that the relationship was all fine were not very convincing.
Tsai very boldly decided to challenge Tsai Chi-chang in his legislative district in the election in January, in spite of her not being local. The KMT stepped aside and ran no candidate, and Mayor Lu campaigned with her. Though she lost, she did far better than any non-DPP candidate in that district since 2008. We will do a column on Tsai and the TPP soon.
The other possibility is party-list lawmaker Jenny Maiyu (麥玉珍, born Mach Ngoc Tran), who has been assigned to Taichung. To maximize their limited stable of experienced politicians with name recognition, the TPP party-list lawmakers have been assigned a geographical region to “represent” and build local knowledge and connections, presumably for a future run as mayor or legislator.
A peaceful compromise could be reached with one running for mayor, and the other the legislature.
Maiyu is known for championing “new immigrant” issues and for her strong stance against domestic violence, which she was once a victim of. She was recently in the news for having to apologize for once having illegally smuggled Taiwanese dragon fruit to try and grow on land she owned in Vietnam. She apparently had no clue it was illegal and freely shared the story at an event.
Maiyu has nowhere the name recognition, charisma, experience or connections as Tsai, but in theory she should be the default candidate. It is possible a compromise could be made where she runs for Changhua County Commissioner, where she lived for many years, or for the legislature.
A big question is whether Ko and Tsai can reconcile. She could shake up the race. Another big puzzle is if Tsai made any sort of agreement with Mayor Lu before accepting her position with the city government.
Tsai explicitly stated after the election she was staying in Taichung to “deep plow” (深耕, conceptually similar to the English “set down roots”) in the city with an eye on a future electoral run. Lu, worrying about splitting the pan-blue vote, may have demanded she not run for mayor.
ANY INDEPENDENTS?
There are often independent candidates that usually go nowhere, and predicting who they might be is difficult in Taichung, though curiously not in Tainan, which has a curious cast of colorful characters. Chen Mei-fei (陳美妃), who got a surprisingly good 1.72 percent in 2022 is not likely to run again. She was just sentenced to 50 days detention for, as the United Daily News put it in a headline with the subtlety characteristic of the local news, “went berserk and ferociously beat her neighbor with a latte.”
Donovan’s Deep Dives is a regular column by Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文) who writes in-depth analysis on everything about Taiwan’s political scene and geopolitics. Donovan is also the central Taiwan correspondent at ICRT FM100 Radio News, co-publisher of Compass Magazine, co-founder Taiwan Report (report.tw) and former chair of the Taichung American Chamber of Commerce. Follow him on X: @donovan_smith.
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