An effort in Taiwan to recall politicians seen as selling out the island’s interests to communist China is gaining ground, raising the possibility of a major setback for Beijing’s hopes of subjugating Taiwan by co-opting its government.
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, elected in January 2024, has advocated tough policies to counter the CCP, including bolstering Taiwan’s defensive capabilities and strengthening its alliance with the United States. However, Lai and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) have been hard-pressed in implementing their program, as the party holds a minority of seats in Taiwan’s parliament, the Legislative Yuan.
As early as May 2024, when Lai assumed office, the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), collectively known as the “blue-white coalition,” used their majority in the Legislative Yuan to attempt structural reforms that would have greatly empowered the parliament at the expense of the presidency; reforms made to the judicial system have also reduced that institution’s effectiveness in checking the legislature.
The blue-white coalition has also leveraged its majority to obstruct the central government budget, order reductions to Taiwan’s defense spending, and block bills aimed at stemming political interference from mainland China.
Initially regarded as having little chance of success, the mass recall movement has gathered more than 1 million signatures across Taiwan, targeting 35 legislators affiliated with the KMT and TPP. Twenty-four of these drives have collected enough signatures—at least 25 percent of a given legislator’s constituents—for a recall vote, and have been submitted for verification.
Recalling ‘Pro-Communist’ Legislators
The recall movement against KMT and TPP legislators was initiated by groups such as the Anti-Communist Taiwan Defense Volunteer Alliance, which, on April 24, held a rally to keep up the signature drive.A rally to “Resist the United Front, Protect Taiwan” was held in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, on April 19, gathering around 55,000 people along Ketagalan Boulevard to reject the CCP’s influence and support the recalls.
The third and final round of signatures to confirm the recall elections will take place starting on the week of May 12. Those recall races validated by Taiwan’s Central Election Commission will be held within 20 to 60 days.
Akio Yaita, a Japanese journalist who serves as executive director of the Indo-Pacific Strategic Institute, estimates that up to a dozen KMT legislators could be successfully recalled.
Speaking at a May 3 recall rally in Keelung, a port city near Taiwan’s capital city, Taiwanese businessman Robert Tsao Hsing-cheng warned that the de facto nation of 23 million could suffer the same fate as Hong Kong should “pro-communist legislators” be permitted to advance their agenda.
Top KMT officials “not only refused to attend the inauguration ceremony of Taiwan’s president [in May 2024], but also went to Beijing to meet with Wang Huning, a senior CCP official,” Tsao noted, referring to a trip that occurred in April last year.
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is the remnant territory of the government that was defeated on the Chinese mainland by the CCP rebels in 1949.
Despite fighting a protracted civil war against the communists when it ruled mainland China, the KMT, or Nationalist Party, has in recent decades adopted a pro-CCP stance, emphasizing cross-strait economic and cultural ties.
The Greatest Threat to a Democratic Taiwan
DPP legislator Puma Shen declared at the May 3 Keelung rally that an alliance of the “pro-red unification Kuomintang” and the CCP constituted the greatest threat to Taiwan’s democracy.
At the Keelung rally, Shen criticized the blue-white camp for blocking more than 40 times a motion in the Legislative Yuan that would have restricted Taiwanese legislators from traveling to mainland China.
He also gave an example of the opposition using procedural methods to obstruct the operations of the parliament.
“One meeting began at 9 a.m. and was dismissed at 9:03 a.m. Nobody was given the opportunity to speak,” he said.
The Anti-Communist Taiwan Defense Volunteer Alliance also warned at its April 24 rally in Taipei about efforts by the KMT–TPP coalition to amend the existing regulations on recall elections to make them harder to initiate.
On April 26, the blue-white camp staged a demonstration to “oppose green communism, fight dictatorship,” portraying the mass recalls as a move toward authoritarianism. In Taiwanese electoral politics, the DPP and its allies are known as the “pan-greens.” At the rally, KMT Chairman Eric Chu Li-luan criticized Lai and ended the event by declaring that the party would campaign for Lai’s own recall from office.
The KMT’s shift toward its current stance came in large measure due to persistent “united front” tactics employed by the CCP for more than a century to subvert and eliminate its traditional enemy.
In addition to ordering frequent naval and aerial patrols to harass and intimidate Taiwan’s defenses, the Chinese regime’s “united front” work targets Taiwanese officials, military personnel, business circles, and other important organizations and individuals.
The meeting between the KMT legislators and senior CCP official Wang Huning mentioned by Robert Tsao occurred on April 26, 2024. Fu Kun-chi, majority leader of the Legislative Yuan, led a delegation of 16 KMT legislators to visit Beijing at the time. There, they were granted an audience with Wang, who is a member of the CCP’s seven-man leadership body and has spent more than a decade in charge of crafting Beijing’s modern ideological doctrine.
Fu, who represents Taiwan’s eastern Hualien county and is subject to a recall effort, has been imprisoned three times for economic crimes. He studied at Jinan University in Guangzhou, southern China, but the degree he earned there is not recognized by the Taiwanese education ministry on account of Jinan being run by the CCP’s United Front Work Group.
Calls for Solidarity Across Party Lines
The roughly 50 Taiwanese civic groups facilitating the mass recall petitions and efforts to monitor the activities of lawmakers represent “the democratic will of Taiwanese society and a constitutional battle against the CCP’s authoritarian regime,” according to Tseng Chien-yuan, executive director of the New School for Democracy, a nonprofit originally founded in Hong Kong.
Yang Hsien-hung, founding chairman of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights in China, told The Epoch Times that the recall process is an opportunity to walk back “the mistaken election of CCP collaborators.”
He added that the KMT’s declaration of recalling Lai is a non-starter, given that the blue-white coalition only commands a slight majority in the Legislative Yuan, rather than the two-thirds needed to oust a sitting president.
The KMT’s pro-Beijing stance has angered some of its own would-be supporters. One group, the “Chinese Anti-Communist Taiwan Protection National Restoration Party,” has joined the recall movement against the KMT, with its chairman, Cheng Kai-li, calling upon Taiwanese of all political stripes to jointly resist the CCP’s designs for taking over the island, according to Taiwan’s SET News.
Tseng said in his statements with NTD that the mass recalls were not about the issue of whether Taiwan should pursue formal independence from China or eventually reunite with the mainland, or a partisan struggle, but “a historic moment where people across Taiwan, transcending party lines, unite to resist the CCP’s united front tactics.”
He pointed out that retired military officers and conservative figures from within the KMT establishment, who previously avoided any possible associations with the Taiwan independence movement, have also stepped forward to support the grassroots recall efforts.
Shen, the DPP legislator, emphasized at the May 3 rally in Keelung that the purpose of the recall movement was not to target the KMT specifically but to safeguard Taiwan’s political system and sovereignty.
“Even if some of the Kuomintang members retain their seats after the recall, it will still be a good thing for Taiwan as long as they hold democratic values and love Taiwan,” he said.
