Who is Han Kuo-yu: could Kaohsiung’s populist mayor be Taiwan’s next president?

He came from nowhere to win last year’s mayoral elections. Now, with 1.2 million ‘Han fans’ and rallies across Taiwan, ‘Bald Guy’ has his sights on the presidency after winning the KMT ticket

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Han Kuo-yu, the polarising populist mayor of Kaohsiung, the largest city in southern Taiwan. Photo: Reuters

Chiu-Ti Jansen

Published: 7:45am, 12 Jul 2019Updated: 5:48pm, 7 Jan 2020

Kai Xuan Night Market was built on an abandoned amusement park in a newly developed area of Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s third-largest city and home to 2.8 million people. It feels like most of them are here on this humid Thursday evening, rammed into the 30,000-square-metre compound lined with food stalls selling sesame-oil chicken and fried stinky tofu.

Through the crowds, photographers jostle to capture their subject, the south-coast city’s mayor, Han Kuo-yu, as he banters for the cameras with an internet celebrity known as the Cholesterol Queen for her masochistic food challenges.

A middle-aged woman straining to catch a glimpse of Han’s shiny bald head says she is from Taipei, more than 350km north, and that she will follow Han’s retinue as it rolls another 200km into Taichung at the weekend. She is not alone. These diehard “Han fans”, who number an estimated 1.2 million, have become media darlings in their own right – as unexpected a development as the 62-year-old Han being mobbed like a teen idol ahead of his party’s primary polls, on July 8-14. If he wins, Han has confirmed he will run for president in 2020.

But Han’s Kuomintang party (KMT) was never supposed to win in Kaohsiung, a city dominated by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for the past 20 years. Han certainly was not supposed to be mayor. It is well established in Taiwan’s political circles that KMT chairman Wu Den-yih sent Han to contest Kaohsiung in 2018 with no expectations of his winning. The last time the city elected a KMT mayor – Wu himself– was 20 years ago.

Supporters of Han Kuo-yu celebrate as Han is elected mayor of Kaohsiung, in November last year. Picture: Reuters

As surprising as Han’s victory was, even to his own party, no one saw the incoming “Han wave”, which swept the KMT to victory in 14 other key cities, spurred by the mayor’s common-man touch and a roiling discontent with the DPP government’s ongoing economic stalemate.

“In the beginning, I only hoped I could complete the campaign,” says Han, in his soft, measured voice. “It started last May, but only in September or October did I sense a change among the people. The DPP had ruled Kaohsiung for so long. People wanted a change. By November, I was confident I was going to win.”