Nantou County Magistrate, seeking re-election for the KMT in 2026
Hsu Shu-hua rose from Nantou County councilor and Nantou City mayor to the Legislative Yuan, and in 2022, weathering campaign controversies that included questions over her thesis, she defeated the DPP's Tsai Pei-hui to take the helm of Nantou, Taiwan's only landlocked county, where mountains far outweigh flatland. Her standing has always rested on the everyday business of county government: responding to typhoons, earthquakes and other natural disasters, maintaining roads and infrastructure, and managing the local finances that support the tea, farming and tourism industries; in Global Views Monthly's 2026 satisfaction survey of county and city leaders, she received a four-and-a-half-star rating. In 2026 she is seeking re-election for the KMT, while the DPP has drafted political newcomer Wen Shih-cheng, a native of Caotun in Nantou and a former president of the New Taipei City Dental Association. The race's biggest flashpoint is an incinerator in Mingjian Township. Nantou has no waste incinerator of its own and relies on other counties and cities to process its trash, more than 300,000 metric tons of waste have piled up, and the county government therefore plans to build a plant able to burn 500 metric tons a day in Mingjian's Xinmin Village; Hsu insists the waste problem must be settled with scientific data rather than outright opposition, citing a poll in which more than 80 percent of residents favored building it as soon as possible. But Mingjian is one of Taiwan's major tea-growing areas, and tea farmers, a residents' self-help group and environmental organizations have pushed back hard, meetings connected with the environmental impact assessment have repeatedly erupted into clashes between police and protesters, and the Ministry of Agriculture has said that Mingjian is a specific agricultural zone where farm production should come first, so the county should find another site if it wants to build the plant. Whether voters embrace her determination to solve the waste problem on her watch will be the central thread in how she is judged.
