Taiwan’s elections are about more than China

With onlyDPPKMT a few days to go before Taiwan’s election on January 13th, campaigning is furious. Across the island-state, presidential candidates are shaking hands at temples and markets by day and leading boisterous rallies at night. Voters are turning out to hear them by the thousand, waving flags and chanting slogans. Much is at stake—even if the issues are not quite as existential as the candidates claim. Taiwan’s two biggest parties, the ruling, pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party () and Chinese nationalist Kuomintang (), have respectively framed the vote as a choice between “democracy and autocracy” and between “war and peace”.The with the mainland have dominated the campaign—it always does. Yet that question will not straightforwardly decide who becomes . That is clear at the rallies, where voters talk as much about domestic concerns such as wages and housing as geopolitics. Nearly half of Taiwan’s voters are concerned about the possibility of a war with China in the next five years, according to a survey by , a Taiwanese business magazine. Yet voters’ biggest priority is economic development, outweighing both national security and cross-strait relations, the same survey found. This prioritising of economic issues is even stronger among voters under 40.