I F RICH BUSINESSMEN bring both strengths and liabilities to politics, then Terry Gou brings them in spades. He is Taiwan’s richest man, with an estimated fortune of $7bn, so he should have no trouble funding the campaign for president he announced last week. What is more, few people in the world could claim to have created more jobs: starting with a tiny loan from his mother, he built the biggest contract-manufacturing company in the electronics business, Foxconn, which makes iPhones for Apple, among other things. It employs close to 1m people. Given voters’ frustration at the wan performance of the economy under the incumbent, Tsai Ing-wen, it is easy to see how Mr Gou might sell himself as the answer to their prayers.

But it is impossible to build such a big business without piling up liabilities, in a political sense, at least. Mr Gou has no shortage. For one thing, the jobs he has created are not in Taiwan, for the most part. And nine years ago Foxconn was hit by a spate of suicides among its workers, prompting many to ask whether it should be treating them better. In fact, Foxconn’s model is the opposite of what Taiwan needs, argues Hsiao Bi-khim, an MP for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party or DPP (Mr Gou is seeking the nomination of the biggest opposition party, the Kuomintang or KMT ). It has flourished by cold-shouldering Taiwanese workers, and building factories in places with lower wages instead, she points out, especially China. At the heart of Taiwan’s economic problems, she contends, are stagnant incomes—a problem for which Foxconn serves more as a cautionary tale than an inspiration.

But questions about Foxconn’s qualities as an employer pale next to the worries Mr Gou’s candidacy prompts about conflicts of interest. China considers Taiwan part of its territory, and asserts its right to bring about reunification by force if necessary. How on earth, many Taiwanese ask, could Mr Gou be counted on to stand up to China when so many of Foxconn’s factories are on the mainland, leaving his personal fortune dependent on the goodwill of the Chinese Communist Party? “China has him by the neck,” the anchor of a popular television chat show observed this week.

Then again, China has the rest of Taiwan by the neck, too. Around 1m Taiwanese, about a tenth of the labour force, work in China. Together with Hong Kong, China hoovers up about 40% of Taiwan’s exports. China rewards emollient Taiwanese governments with economic fillips such as a boom in tourism from the mainland, and punishes standoffish ones by taking them away. The KMT has responded to this system by not formally renouncing the goal of reunification and by seeking to strengthen economic ties. The DPP , in contrast, stresses that Taiwan is an independent country like any other, despite the economic retribution such talk brings. Voters have to choose, in essence, between economic benefits that put the country even more at China’s mercy, or foreign-policy-induced austerity.

Mr Gou’s candidacy simply presents a more acute version of this dilemma. Shortly after he joined the race, Ms Tsai took a swipe at him on social media for saying, in response to anti-China protests a couple of years ago, “You cannot eat democracy.” Mr Gou lashed out, saying Ms Tsai had taken the quote out of context because she was either “really stupid and really naive” or “really malicious and really wilful”. All he had meant, he insisted, was that democracy should be used to improve people’s lives.

Mr Gou’s fury at Ms Tsai’s gibe suggests that he knows it would be political suicide to be seen as advocating the trade-off that China is so clearly offering, of greater prosperity at the expense of independence. Bruce Jacobs of Monash University in Australia argues that Taiwan has, in effect, a built-in DPP majority, and that KMT candidates have to find ways to broaden their appeal beyond the party’s base to get elected.