Taiwan’s Trump Wants to Make Nice With Beijing

A billionaire is making an early run for a hugely consequential presidential election next year that has the potential to reshape the world order as we know it. Meet Taiwan’s Terry Gou.

Gou announced last month that he would seek a nomination for the Taiwanese presidency from the country’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), presenting himself as the best candidate to avoid a war with China. “Peace is not taken for granted, and people need to make the correct choice,” he said, adding that he hopes to “resolve the crisis.”

One of Taiwan’s wealthiest people, with a net worth of around $7 billion, Gou is entering the fray at a fraught geopolitical moment, offering dialogue with Taiwan’s cross-strait neighbor to dispel the growing specter of military conflict. But his deep personal and business ties with China could make him an imperfect messenger. 

The KMT has undergone something of an ideological shift since fleeing China in the late 1940s and establishing the Taiwanese government, replacing its radically anti-China stance with more of a “don’t rock the boat” strategy since the early 2000s. In this century, it has espoused a somewhat more pro-China stance than Taiwan’s ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of incumbent President Tsai Ing-wen, which endorses complete independence for the island. Tsai can’t run again due to term limits, and the DPP has nominated current Vice President Lai Ching-te—considered even more pro-independence than Tsai—as its candidate for next January’s vote. 

“You must prepare for war to avoid war,” Lai said last month.

Gou figures friendly relations with Beijing are the best shield against a possible military invasion that is the subject of rapidly increasing concern in both Taipei and Washington. And he has spent years quite literally putting his money where his mouth is. Foxconn, the tech conglomerate Gou founded in 1974 that is now best known as the largest contract manufacturer of Apple’s iPhones, has sprawling factories in China that account for the bulk of its production and employs over a million Chinese workers. 

Gou stepped down as chairman of Foxconn in 2019, the first time he ran for Taiwan’s highest office, but he failed to win a KMT primary and subsequently quit the party. The billionaire has mended fences, with the KMT at least. He’s hoping the fraught geopolitical climate will catapult him this time, making the case that the DPP’s pro-independence message will further provoke a Chinese invasion. Senior U.S. defense officials have said publicly that Beijing may make a bid to forcibly cow what it regards as a renegade province by about 2027.

“The increasing sense of crisis or concern in the U.S. about a potential Chinese military action against Taiwan is actually helping the KMT’s case in this upcoming election,” said Kharis Templeman, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who focuses on Taiwan. “They have a pretty credible reputation for being the party that can smooth things in the relationship with Beijing, and if you really believe that there may be a war in the next five years, then the KMT has a pretty strong case to make in front of voters that ‘if you don’t want war, vote for us.’” 

That’s certainly the message Gou is bringing to his campaign, recently telling an audience at Taiwan’s Tunghai University that China would not attack if he were president. If the bluster sounds familiar, there’s a reason for that.

“There’s a kind of rich, self-made billionaire personality that assumes because they’ve made a lot of money and they’ve had all of this success over the years, that they know better than anybody else how to solve the problems that face the country,” Templeman said. “I suspect part of what’s motivating him is just the kind of ego that comes with being in a very prominent position in the business community and thinking that you could run the government in Taiwan better than any of these yahoos on either side of the political spectrum.”

The parallels with another repeat contender are clear, including for Gou himself. Former U.S. President Donald Trump is hawkish on China but dovish to a fault with one of the United States’ main adversaries, Russia. Gou is little different.

“Gou fashions himself as the Taiwan version of Donald Trump,” said Russell Hsiao, the executive director of the Washington-based Global Taiwan Institute. 

Unlike Trump, Gou has yet to succeed in a bid for the presidency, and experts say he’s a long shot this time around as well. Hou Yu-ih, the mayor of the northern city of New Taipei, is widely considered the front-runner for the KMT candidacy and is seen as a more moderate choice with a better shot against the DPP’s Lai. But Hou has not officially declared his candidacy, and Gou’s extremely public campaign is sucking oxygen out of the room. 

The KMT, though, is not taking any chances. It changed its primaries, replacing the preliminary votes that Gou lost four years ago with a more opaque nominating process. The backroom may be smoky, but they can see clearly.

“I just think that the KMT is more likely to choose Hou Yu-ih because they think that he has a fighting chance at least of beating Lai, and I think they think that Terry—in part because of his background and Foxconn and his relations with China—that he would be easy fodder for the DPP to criticize,” said Bonnie Glaser, the managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. 

People in Taiwan, like those inside the Pentagon’s E-ring, may be worried about a Chinese invasion. And a Gou run might defuse those fears. If it goes anywhere.

“My sense is that it’s a net liability to have these long-standing business ties in mainland China, and the DPP I think is salivating at the prospect that he would be the candidate and then they’ve got an easy target,” Templeman said. “He would have a very hard time winning the general election.”

FP staff writer Christina Lu contributed reporting.