Populist mayor picked to run against Taiwan’s president

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A populist mayor in Taiwan who favors closer ties with China won the opposition party’s nomination to run against President Tsai Ing-wen, who has been sharply critical of Beijing’s attempts to pressure the island into unification.

The nomination of Han Kuo-yu, who survived a challenge from Terry Gou, founder of the world’s largest iPhone assembler, will offer Taiwan’s voters a stark choice in January’s election between governments leaning toward Washington or Beijing.

Tsai, the incumbent from the Democratic Progressive Party, drew sharp condemnation from China last week when she visited New York City and spoke at Columbia University. The speech underlined the warmest ties between Washington and Taipei in two decades.

Han, mayor of the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, was selected by the opposition Kuomintang based on the results of public opinion and phone surveys taken over the past week that showed he was backed by 45% of respondents compared with 28% for Gou.

“Han’s primary victory was quite convincing,” said Austin Wang, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who studies Taiwan politics.

Han has accused Tsai’s government of failing to improve people’s lives, while suggesting that some recent authoritarian East Asian leaders offer a model for Taiwan, which democratized in the early 1990s after nearly four decades of brutal martial law.

At a large June 1 rally in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, Han singled out three political figures for praise: Chiang Ching-kuo, the former Kuomintang dictator of Taiwan; Lee Kuan Yew, the late authoritarian ruler of Singapore; and Deng Xiaoping, who initiated economic overhauls in China in the 1980s but was responsible for the Tiananmen Square...