Populist Discourses in Taiwan and the Case of Han Kuo-yu

Abstract

The article analyses the rise and fall of the Kuomintang candidate in the 2020 Taiwanese presidential election, Han Kuo-yu. It examines how three leading Taiwanese newspapers, the China Times, the Liberty Times, and the United Daily News, have reported about him and his populist strategy and style. Han Kuo-yu is almost uniformly viewed as a populist due to his anti-elite discourse, self-styling as a common man, and use of simple and direct language. The analysis of Han Kuo-yu and the media coverage about him is based on three leading approaches to defining and understanding populism—the ‘ideational’, ‘political-strategic’, and ‘socio-cultural’ approaches—and academic definitions of populism that have been used and invented by scholars in Taiwan since the island’s democratisation in the 1990s.