Economics first

Tsai denied currying favor with Chinese officials to advance his business and said he wants only to help Taiwan get over its wariness of the mainland. China “is very democratic in lots of places. Lots of things are not what people outside think,” he said, adding that it is “constantly moving forward” while “Taiwan progresses very slowly.”

Elections, he said, are fine, but economics should come first: “Most of us don’t want to become some sort of chairman or president. . . . From the standpoint of ordinary people, the most important thing is to eat a little better, sleep a little better and be a little happier.”

Tsai said he, too, used to fear China’s ruling Communist Party and didn’t want to risk doing business on the mainland, but that changed after the 1989 military assault on student protesters in Tiananmen Square. While the crackdown outraged most in Taiwan, Tsai said he was struck by footage of a lone protester standing in front of a People’s Liberation Army tank. The fact that the man wasn’t killed, he said, showed that reports of a massacre were not true: “I realized that not that many people could really have died.”

The party’s own propaganda apparatus made the same argument at the time, citing the tank incident as evidence of the military’s “humanity.” What happened to the unidentified man who faced down the tank is still not known. Hundreds of others were killed by the army elsewhere in Beijing on June 3-4, 1989.

Tsai has since moved most of Want Want’s operations to China, where the company employs more than 50,000 people, compared with 6,000 in Taiwan. It has 331 sales offices in China. In Taiwan, it has two. His corporate jet is painted bright red. Focused on selling food, Want Want “needs mouths,” Tsai said. “Taiwan has only 23 million people, but China has more than a billion. . . . The most important thing is that the mainland market is so big.” It generates more than 90 percent of his profits.

A more pro-China line

When Tsai first bought China Times and an affiliated television station, rumors spread that he had received encouragement and even money from Beijing, which was wary of the media group falling into the hands of Lai, the owner of Apple Daily.

Lai was near to signing a deal but lost out at the last minute when Tsai offered more money.

Tsai denied getting any help from Beijing. “I’ve already got money,” he said. “Why would I go and take their money?”

Since the takeover, the paper has nonetheless veered sharply toward a more pro-China line, say journalists who have worked there and media analysts. The goal, according to Want Want’s own company brochure, is to make China Times “the most influential Chinese-language daily” so as to “benefit the public” and “promote peace and harmony across the Strait.” Flora Chang, a professor at National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of Journalism, said Tsai’s media “are very biased” in favor of positive news about China.

Wuerkaixi, a former Tiananmen Square student leader who now lives in exile in Taiwan, said he used to regularly get asked to write columns in China Times but not anymore.

When a provincial Communist Party boss traveled to Taiwan from China in 2010, he got an effusive greeting from Tsai on the front page: “On behalf of colleagues at Want Want, I welcome the Hubei Province (Party) Committee Secretary.” The Chinese official, who visited CtiTV, a cable channel owned by Tsai, was invited to “give guidance.”

Tsai said he was just being polite and denied being obsequious to boost his business in China. “I don’t stroke the horse’s bottom,” he said, using a Chinese phrase for flattery.