The DPP's Taipei mayoral search has become a farce. When Puma Shen (沈伯洋) surfaced as a possible nominee, Chen Po-wei (陳柏惟) — a former legislator freshly joined to the party — praised him as too gifted to waste on a mere mayoral race: someone who could "take CIA funding with one hand and earn Chinese money with the other." The compliment landed as an indictment. The party's inability to find a credible candidate in Taiwan's most contested city is a symptom of something much deeper.
Enoch Wu and the Fiction of a Primary
The names in circulation — Cheng Li-chun (鄭麗君), Puma Shen, Fan Yun (范雲), and Enoch Wu (吳怡農) — share one trait: none can plausibly beat the blue camp. The differences among them mostly concern their ability to energize down-ballot races, and apart from Cheng, those differences are slim.
The real embarrassment is not the lack of a strong candidate but the collapse of process. Enoch Wu registered for the Taipei mayoral primary last October, following party rules. Five months on, he remains the sole registrant — and has been treated as if he never filed. When insiders debate who should run, his name simply disappears. No one finds this disrespectful to Wu, and no one acknowledges that the primary has been exposed as a fiction.
The 2014 precedent is instructive but not consoling. That year the DPP deliberated for months over a shortlist including former Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), then dissolved the panel without a single poll — because Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was already polling ahead of every name on it. The party eventually backed Ko and won. The current delay is different: then, stalling was a strategy. Now, it is an admission.
Puma Shen's Cognitive Warfare Theatre
Taipei has leaned blue for decades, but the advantage is not fixed. The city has a long history of electing non-KMT mayors. The DPP, now in its second consecutive national term, has largely spent whatever goodwill it accumulated from that opposition-era tradition. It still invokes the memory of democratic martyrs while in office prosecuting citizens for insulting the president online, tightening national security laws in ways it once condemned, and pursuing espionage cases at a pace some critics liken to the late White Terror period.
Beyond resisting Beijing, the DPP has little to offer. Fan Yun, a professor from National Taiwan University, has made renaming her legislative signature — including, at one point, targeting the English name of Academia Sinica. Her default attack on opponents is accusing them of supporting "one country, two systems," evidence optional.
Puma Shen works an even narrower register. In his telling, red is everywhere: in the mainland-born spouses of residents, in the KMT, in cross-strait AI links, in joint disaster relief, in medical exchanges he has called preparation for "united front demonstration zones." The logic points toward reversing four decades of cross-strait opening at any cost — a posture recalling the hardline security agencies that once treated all mainland contact as subversion. His own family, meanwhile, has done profitable business there. That Lai Ching-te (賴清德) personally placed Shen on the party list suggests the president shares this worldview, which goes some way toward explaining why his approval ratings have not recovered.
With Lai and Cho at the Helm, Any DPP Nominee Is Cannon Fodder
Cheng Li-chun and Enoch Wu are considerably more grounded than Fan Yun or Puma Shen, but both remain tethered to the party's ideological framework. Cheng combines the independence platform with a firm anti-nuclear stance — a liability for anyone trying to project policy competence. Wu's organization Kuo-kuo Taiwan has built genuine credibility in civil preparedness, and he does not reflexively reduce every issue to Beijing's influence. That reasonableness has won him no favor inside the party. The problem is not Wu; it is a party whose judgment has failed.
One recent exchange captures the incoherence. When KMT chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) visited Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum in Nanjing, the Mainland Affairs Council's deputy minister mocked her beforehand for not daring to mention the Republic of China by name. When Cheng did invoke the Republic of China at the mausoleum, the same official accused her of accommodating Beijing's narrative. The DPP insists the KMT assert the ROC identity on the mainland while the DPP quietly erases it at home — annotating passports with "Taiwan," and now stripping "Chinese" from the English name of the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Council.
When DPP legislators moved to remove Sun Yat-sen's status as national founder, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) stopped them and pointed lawmakers toward social welfare bills. President Lai applauded the council's renaming. The country now has a president who will not affirm the Republic of China framework, and a premier, Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), who treats Legislative Yuan votes and confirmed appointments as optional.
Against that backdrop, the nominee's identity barely matters. Whoever the DPP sends to Taipei will be fighting from behind. The only open question is whether the loss comes with enough dignity to be absorbed, or with enough force to finally demand an answer.
