Taipei: As Taiwan’s election approaches next month, it is not only fraught ties with China competing for electors’ attention.
The candidates are exchanging blows over everything from property disputes to whether drinking whisky is out of touch, in a raucous and freewheeling display of the island’s democracy.
Taiwan’s January 13 presidential and parliamentary election will define how the Chinese-claimed island deals with Beijing and the subject is indeed a major bone of contention.
But it is far from the sole issue debated at rallies, press conferences and on television talk shows where the uncensored exchanges are a major contrast to China, which says it is a socialist democracy but has been ruled only by the Communist Party since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949.
