Will Hong Kong again be a factor when Taiwan heads to the polls in 2024?

There were high hopes among Taiwan’s main opposition party when Han Kuo-yu entered the island’s presidential race in the summer of 2019.

The populist Kuomintang candidate had months earlier been elected mayor of the southern port city of Kaohsiung – a traditional stronghold of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party. It was a landslide win for the former businessman, who was seen as a strong contender for president in 2020.

That all changed when anti-government protests broke out in Hong Kong, triggered by an unpopular extradition bill that would have allowed suspects to be sent to mainland China for trial. There were concerns over the potential for politically motivated persecution and unfair trials on the mainland, and the bill was eventually withdrawn.

The months of turmoil it unleashed in Hong Kong gave Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s re-election campaign a powerful boost. Tsai, of the independence-leaning DPP, seized the opportunity to trash Han and the Beijing-friendly KMT, and attacked Beijing as an untrustworthy negotiating partner that had reneged on its promise to respect Hong Kong’s freedoms and allow a “high degree of autonomy” for 50 years.

Beijing has long held up Hong Kong as a model for Taiwan – it sees self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province to be “reunified” under a similar “one country, two systems” framework. For decades mainland Chinese leaders have promised a sceptical Taiwan more autonomy than Hong Kong.

Han eventually lost the presidential election, and his mayorship. The defeat plunged the KMT into crisis as supporters lost hope in its moderate strategy on Beijing and questioned its ambivalence about the island’s future.