City Beat | What Hong Kong can learn from Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu’s openness and flexibility in politics
- Han, who paid a swift visit to the city this weekend, has reached across Taiwan’s political divide but is also willing to talk to Beijing
- It is a pragmatism that is born of Han’s main concern, the economic well-being of his city, which was itself a motive for his Hong Kong visit
“Sell goods! Welcome people! Prosperous Kaohsiung!”
This was the viral campaign slogan for Han Kuo-yu, the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party candidate who, against all odds, won a landslide victory in last November’s mayoral election in Kaohsiung, for decades a stronghold of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has rebuffed any talk of Taiwan’s reunification with mainland China.
Han’s short stay here was significant as he was the first Taiwanese official to make the trip since pro-independence President Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016, prompting Beijing to scrap all official cross-strait exchanges, including those between Hong Kong and Taiwan. Even more significantly, Han enjoys higher popularity ratings than Tsai, and is seen as the KMT’s likely presidential hopeful for next year’s election.
An intriguing aspect of the phenomenon described as the “Han wave” by Taiwan’s media was that he was never afraid of losing the support of pro-DPP voters in such a “deep green” city – referring to the party’s symbolic colour – by openly recognising the One China Consensus of 1992, which is the bottom line for Beijing in conducting any cross-strait communication.
