The Democratic Progressive Party has yet to formally nominate a candidate for Taipei mayor. But legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) has effectively positioned himself as the frontrunner — debuting a new hairstyle at a public cultural event and triggering a wave of social media comparisons to Korean actor Bae Yong-joon, Japanese star Kimura Takuya, former Japanese prime minister Koizumi Junichiro's son Shinjiro, and Taiwanese actor Chang Hsiao-chuan.
His new look, commentators said, had "rattled Chiang Wan-an's nerves" and embodied "Taipei's urban future."
The awkward reality is that Shen, cast as the DPP's vessel of forward-looking ambition, stumbled badly the moment he opened his mouth on Taipei's own political history. Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who served eight years as Taipei mayor, was not entirely wrong when he quipped that the DPP's dream ticket — Shen in Taipei, Wang Yi-chuan in Taoyuan, Chen Po-wei in Taichung — is not a coalition of rivals but a coalition of political comedians.
After a decade of continuous DPP governance, these three have become the party's standard-bearers. That says more about the DPP than about the candidates themselves.
Does Puma Shen Know Enough About Taipei to Run It?
The DPP's tendency to select candidates on the basis of image and likeability is not new — the party ran so-called "beauty assassin" candidates in local elections as far back as 1998. Whether a Taipei mayoral race is won on personal appeal is debatable; of the five mayors elected since direct mayoral elections were introduced in 1994, roughly half could be described as conventionally attractive by any measure.
The debate over whether Shen is good-looking enough is beside the point. The flood of posts comparing him to celebrities reveals three things: first, that even his own camp acknowledges his previous image was a liability — few would have called his old hairstyle "presentable"; second, that beyond his appearance there is little else his supporters have chosen to discuss; and third, as DPP legislator Chuang Jui-hsiung (莊瑞雄) put it, Shen keeps resembling everyone but himself.
That last point is the most telling. What the DPP is trying to manufacture is a version of Puma Shen who does not actually resemble Puma Shen — an admission, in plain language, that they know the original may not appeal to Taipei voters. Which raises the obvious question: if you know he's a hard sell, why nominate him at all?
Shen was clearly prepared for media scrutiny when he stepped out with his new image. He did not shy away from questions. But his preparation was visibly distorted by his own ideological preoccupations.
Shen has built much of his public profile on the study of cognitive warfare and the CCP threat — and he appears to have absorbed his own framework so completely that it has warped his reading of Taipei's actual history. The result was a series of basic factual errors. He claimed that "the KMT had been in Taipei for seventy years since 1949." When a reporter noted that five of Taipei's mayors were independents, Shen adjusted: "Before 1996 there was no real democracy in Taipei. After 1996, most of the time it was the KMT."
Neither claim holds up.
Taipei has had mayors since 1945 — eighty years, not seventy. The city held its first mayoral election in 1951, won by independent Wu San-lien, who is believed to have had tacit KMT backing. Independent Kao Yu-shu won twice after that. When Taipei was elevated to special municipality status in 1967, Kao was serving his second term and was converted directly to an appointed mayor.
The Legislative Yuan's full re-election took place in 1993; direct elections for provincial and municipal executives were introduced in 1994 — both before the 1996 presidential election. Most critically, the first directly elected Taipei mayor after democratization was Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the DPP.
Shen may be able to forget many things. But forgetting the man who became the DPP's first president and the architect of the party's political breakthrough is not a minor oversight. His claim that "before 1996 Taipei had no real democracy, and after 1996 it was mostly KMT" is simply wrong.
Can Puma Shen's Taipei Policy Platform Hold Up to Scrutiny?
Shen did show some genuine preparation on municipal policy. He cited monthly population decline figures drawn from Taipei's civil affairs bureau testimony before the city council — roughly one to two urban precincts lost per month.
Population outflow from Taipei is a real issue. But it is also a complex one. Taipei's daytime working population exceeds its nighttime registered population by more than 600,000 — meaning the city functions at a scale considerably larger than its household registration numbers suggest. The decline in registered residents is shaped by low birth rates, high property prices, and the gradual integration of the broader Taipei-Taoyuan metropolitan area into a single functional commuting zone.
Some of this pressure is also tied to central government policy directions, including long-discussed but unrealized plans to relocate the legislature — proposals that fall under concepts of "capital decompression" or a dual-capital framework. In other words, some of the demographic trends Shen is attributing to municipal failure are being driven, at least in part, by the DPP-led central government's own policy inclinations.
The key point remains: neither demographic decline nor housing costs are problems a municipal government can reverse on its own.
Shen's use of the word "ecosystem" to frame Taipei's traffic congestion was initially striking. But when he followed it by arguing that congestion is fundamentally connected to labor policy and childcare policy, the logic became genuinely difficult to follow. Is he proposing that Taipei reduce the number of businesses it hosts? Encourage staggered working hours? Persuade residents to have fewer children so the streets are less crowded — or more children, with one parent mandated to stay home?
Both labor and childcare policy are set at the central government level. The city is an implementing body, not a policymaking one. Rather than reaching for ecosystem metaphors, a serious candidate would do better to make concrete commitments about securing central government funding.
Is Taipei Really KMT Territory — And Does the DPP Understand the Difference?
Shen appears to operate under the assumption that Taipei is structurally KMT territory. This is a significant misreading of the city's electoral history.
The first directly elected mayor in the authoritarian era was an independent. The last appointed mayor before direct elections were restored was also an independent. When Chen Shui-bian won the mayoral race in 1994, the KMT controlled the central government under Lee Teng-hui (李登輝). When Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) won his first term, he did so despite being openly disfavored by Lee. Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) won his first term under a DPP central government. Ko won his first term with DPP backing while the KMT held power nationally; his second term — when he ran against both major parties — came under DPP governance. Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) won his first term while the DPP held the presidency.
The pattern is consistent: Taipei voters do not have a particular loyalty to the KMT. They have a consistent preference for candidates willing to push back against whoever is running the central government — regardless of party color.
Seen in this light, it is genuinely difficult to see how the DPP — whoever it nominates — mounts a credible challenge against an incumbent mayor in a city where the ruling party is almost by definition at a structural disadvantage. The argument that Chiang Wan-an has performed poorly is not a viable campaign platform when the DPP central government is rated lower in public opinion than the mayor it is trying to unseat.
Would Taipei Voters Support Cutting the Last Cross-Strait Dialogue Channel?
President Lai Ching-te's (賴清德) mass recall campaign — a DPP-backed effort in early 2026 to recall dozens of opposition legislators, which collapsed at the ballot box — ended in failure, and Taipei was among the cities where that failure cut deepest. Shen was one of the most visible public faces of that effort.
Cross-strait relations under the DPP have entered a prolonged freeze. The Twin Cities Forum between Taipei and Shanghai remains the only functioning official-level exchange channel between the two sides. In a city where war-weariness runs high, Shen's proposal to abolish the Twin Cities Forum and replace it with an "Unlimited Cities Forum" targeting New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo — because, he says, that is more befitting of Taipei's status as a capital — is a notable position to take.
He is also understating Shanghai's global standing. Taipei is one of several major Chinese-speaking cities; Shanghai is a top-tier global financial center that ranks above more than fifty of Taipei's own sister cities by most measures. City diplomacy should not be conducted through a hierarchy of perceived prestige. The more relevant question is whether Taipei voters actually want to sever one of the last remaining exchange channels with the mainland.
The irony deepens when DPP supporters celebrate Shen as "Wuan Hou" (武安侯)— a reference to the male lead of Zhu Yu (逐玉), a popular mainland streaming drama. The comparison inadvertently highlights a contradiction the party has never resolved.
The DPP has banned mainland streaming platforms, while being unable to stop the public from watching mainland dramas, some of which have become major hits in Taiwan. When Culture Minister Li Yuan (李遠) welcomed the actor who played Wuan Hou — a character mainland state media had already criticized for looking too pretty and insufficiently martial — saying he would fall in love with Taiwan's non-judgmental aesthetic culture, the Mainland Affairs Council's deputy minister Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) immediately walked it back: the mainland should sort out its own aesthetic standards before discussing cultural exchange, he said.
Block first, talk later — a neat summary of DPP cross-strait cultural policy. The same party apparatus that celebrated Shen as a Wuan Hou figure is the one that reflexively blocks the very exchanges that made that character famous in Taiwan in the first place.
A candidate who argues that all cross-strait exchange is a form of cognitive warfare, and who proposes scrapping the Twin Cities Forum, cannot credibly play the role of a cosmopolitan, bridge-building mayor — regardless of what his hair looks like.
Shen is Shen. His entry into the Taipei mayor's race may generate substantial social media volume, and the DPP's online activist base — the self-styled "bluebirds" and the party's broader digital flank — will work hard to manufacture a likeable image out of whatever material is available. But the recall campaign already demonstrated the gap between online enthusiasm and actual electoral outcomes. The louder the expectations, the harder the fall.
