SOAS Research Online

Abstract

As unrest erupted in Hong Kong in June 2019, the political scenario in Taiwan started to change as well. The aim of this preliminary research is to explore the changes that have occurred on Tsai Ing-wen and Han Kuo-yu discourses on social media after the beginning of the protests in Hong Kong and throughout the 2020 presidential election campaign in Taiwan. The main argument of the article is that the “Hong Kong factor” became a popular issue in the Taiwanese context to the extent that it influenced the narrative of both the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Kuomintang (KMT). In order to prove this claim, the article analyses the posts on Facebook of Tsai Ing-wen and Han Kuo-yu shared between June 2019 and January 2020, and it seeks to reveal the discourse strategies they put into practice when talking about the Hong Kong situation and comparing it with the one in Taiwan. Although some early conclusions are reached in this paper, the research is still preliminary due to the extensiveness of the topic investigated.