Many have questioned the fate of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as party founder Ko Wen-je faces over 28 years in prison on corruption charges. The charges against Ko are linked to the Core Pacific City Mall, with the former Taipei mayor accused of receiving kickbacks in return for expanding the mall’s floor area ratio in contravention of urban planning regulations.
Ko remains jailed, though restrictions on visitors has been lifted temporarily because of his father’s funeral.
A Party Built Around Ko
The TPP was formed by Ko in August 2019 in preparation for his anticipated presidential run. This was not the first time that Ko had built up a political grouping around himself. Ahead of the 2018 local elections, Ko formed a grouping referred to as the “White Force” or “Colorless Force” in order to back his bid for re-election as Taipei mayor.
Much as the formation of the “White Force” was aimed at building up a political force to back Ko in the Taipei mayoral election, the formation of the TPP was understood as meant to back Ko in an eventual presidential run.
It was clear that the party was built around Ko from the onset. The party’s founding assembly in 2019 was on August 6 – Ko’s birthday. Likewise, the name of the TPP was a reference to the political party of the same name formed in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial era by political activist Chiang Wei-shui. Chiang shares the same birthday as Ko, who has often expressed admiration for Chiang, and claimed to follow in his footsteps. Like Ko, Chiang was originally a physician before entering politics.
After years of speculation, Ko finally threw his hat into the ring for the 2024 presidential election, running as the TPP’s candidate. While he didn’t win, Ko performed quite strongly as a third-party candidate in a crowded presidential race, in which he was up not only against Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), but also Hou Yu-ih of the Kuomintang (KMT). (FoxConn founder Terry Gou originally ran as an independent; after eventually withdrawing from the race, he appeared to be most closely aligned with Ko.)
Ko had originally entered politics in 2014 as an independent candidate, competing against Sean Lien of the KMT with the endorsement of the DPP. With his entrance into politics as an outsider who had no previous electoral experience, Ko sought to establish his credentials as an independent political candidate who was distinct from the “blue” of the KMT and “green” of the DPP.
In a similar vein, Ko’s political party sought to appeal to those dissatisfied with the two-party status quo of Taiwanese politics. And yet Ko and his TPP actively explored a possible joint ticket with the KMT, an effort that ultimately dissolved after the two parties could not agree on who would run for president and who would be the vice presidential candidate.
In the year since the election, the TPP has sided with the KMT on a series of a controversial measures – including efforts to grant the legislature investigative powers, to block or drastically cut the national budget, and to freeze the Constitutional Court. Even so, the TPP has continued Ko’s independent political stylings, claiming to be a “white” political party that is neither blue nor green.
Yet even by the time he launched the “White Force,” Ko had already pivoted toward alliance with the pan-Blue camp. The TPP’s founding politicians, for instance, were much more commonly drawn from members of pan-Blue political parties. It was a surprising turn for a politician originally endorsed by the DPP. The souring point between Ko and the DPP seemed to be the latter’s refusal to endorse Ko in the 2018 mayoral elections, instead fielding Pasuya Yao as their candidate.
Seeing as the TPP was built around Ko from its conception, his imprisonment posed a major challenge for the party. The TPP has leaned into the political narrative that the charges against Ko are fabricated by the DPP. Though there was some discussions of proposals that would keep Ko in the leadership of the TPP – either having him remain chair while the party named an acting leader, or naming him the honorary leader – Ko chose to step down from his position even though he would remain part of the party.
Late last month, the party announced a new leader, with Huang Kuo-chang winning handily in an election for party chair. Huang defeated his sole opponent, former legislator Tsai Pi-ru, by an overwhelming count of 8,903 votes to 360 votes, meaning that he won 96.11 percent of votes to Tsai’s 3.89 percent.
Enter Huang Kuo-chang
The new leader of the TPP is a relatively new party member: Huang has been part of the TPP for just 16 months. By contrast, Tsai has been a member of the TPP since its founding as a close associate of Ko dating back to his days as a physician at National Taiwan University Hospital.
At the same time, Huang’s political trajectory in some ways echoes that of Ko, as both are politicians who are largely perceived as having moved from the pan-Green camp to the pan-Blue camp in the past decade. Huang, too, entered politics in 2014 as an individual with no prior electoral experience. Huang was suddenly catapulted to national fame as one of the leaders of the 2014 Sunflower Movement after a career as a legal scholar.
The Sunflower Movement, which was largely student-led, involved the occupation of the Taiwanese legislature in protest of a trade agreement with China advanced by the KMT. In the wake of the movement, Huang became the leader of the New Power Party, which framed itself as more progressive and more independence-leaning than the DPP. The New Power Party was critical of what it framed as the entrenched corruption of the DPP from its years in power during the Chen Shui-bian administration, arguing that the party had become not so different from the KMT.
Huang had an independent political career before becoming a TPP member, during which he was sometimes at odds with Ko. In the past, Huang flatly criticized Ko’s claim that there was “one family on both sides of the Taiwan Strait” as a reason to rule out the prospect of political cooperation with him. More recently, however, Huang has professed loyalty to Ko and his ideals.
Despite past frictions, there are strong parallels in Ko and Huang’s profiles. Both are male politicians who previously served at elite academic institutions before entering politics without any prior experience, and both are known for strident political commentary. These similarities may be why the TPP’s party base so overwhelmingly preferred Huang over Tsai. It also helped that Ko himself chose to name Huang acting chair of the TPP when he resigned.
In part, however, the overwhelming vote for Huang may have simply been a sign that there were few other options.
The series of events around Ko’s arrest had left a power vacuum in the TPP, with many party heavyweights disgraced or pushed out. Many of these changes involved corruption allegations levied against TPP members.
Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao was removed from office and arrested over graft charges; she is accused of embezzling fees meant to subsidize hiring legislative assistants. Since then, little has been heard of her in Taiwanese politics. The charges against Kao have long been overshadowed by those facing Ko.
Separately, Vivian Huang, also known as Huang Shan-shan, was pushed out of the TPP’s central committee and stripped of her party membership to take responsibility over financial accounting issues faced by the TPP last year. Specifically, the TPP declared no campaign expenditures whatsoever in the 2024 elections, a charge that the party did not deny at the time, though it insisted the discrepancy was an innocent mistake. Ko adopted an attitude of contrition for the TPP’s financial accounting issues, stating shortly before his arrest that he would take a three-month leave of absence from his role as party leader to sort out the TPP’s financial affairs.
Vivian Huang made public appearances with the Ko family through the course of his arrest, showing that they still had a close relationship. However, as Vivian Huang had been stripped of her party membership, she could not challenge Huang Kuo-chang in the party chair election.
Lastly, Tsai Pi-ru resigned from her position as TPP legislator in 2022 after facing charges of plagiarism for her master’s thesis. This took place during a series of controversies in Taiwan involving pan-Blue and pan-Green politicians facing plagiarism charges over academic degrees – going to show the importance of elite educational credentials in Taiwanese political culture. While Tsai ran for the legislature again in 2024 as a TPP candidate, she was defeated by Tsai Chi-chang of the DPP. Before throwing her hat into the race for party chair, Tsai Pi-ru actually appeared to be distancing herself from the party – which may have been another factor in her defeat.
With no other party heavyweights left to challenge him, Huang was able to win in the TPP party chair election by a large margin. At the same time, arguably Huang’s own success suggest that none of the TPP’s other candidates has been able to develop strong political followings of their own. Huang was already a national-level figure in Taiwanese politics before joining the TPP. The same could not be said about either Vivian Huang, Tsai Pi-ru, or Ann Kao.
Whither the TPP?
It remains to be seen how the TPP fares under Huang’s leadership. Ironically, the party now largely struggles with the same challenge that faced Huang when he was leader of the NPP: an increasing inability to distinguish its political brand. With the TPP having been pressed into such a close alliance with the KMT in the past year, the TPP risks becoming a “little Blue” party that is largely indistinguishable from the KMT except by being smaller.
Ironically, this is effectively the same issue faced by the NPP, which gradually became perceived as a “little Green” party that was indistinguishable from the larger party in the pan-Green camp, the DPP. As such, when the party could not sort out its relationship to the DPP ahead of 2020 presidential elections, this led to the disintegration of the NPP. Its two heavyweights, Huang Kuo-chang and Freddy Lim were at odds about whether to openly endorse Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP as presidential candidate, and Lim eventually left the NPP in protest. Since then, though the NPP continues to exist, it has been a marginal force in Taiwanese politics.
However, biggest challenge facing Huang as TPP chair may be whether he can inherit a party that was originally built around another politician altogether. Despite some clear similarities in their political profiles, Huang ultimately is not Ko – and whether anyone else can lead a party created to foster Ko’s presidential bid remains an open question.