By now, according to the research institute of NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, influential media conglomerates in Taiwan have become pro-Beijing; their major shareholders have been given greater business opportunities in China’s vast market. Major Taiwanese newspapers and TV stations regularly feature content that hardly differs from that in China or routinely heap praise on Chinese leaders.

In March 2013, the Taiwanese newspaper China Times described Liu Yandong, a vice premier who once headed the Chinese Communist Party’s vast influence machine, as one of “three golden flowers among new leaders.” In March this year, it ran an opinion piece setting out a convoluted argument for why unlimited terms were a good thing for a good leader such as President Xi Jinping of China. Other examples abound.

James Moriarty, the chairman of the board of trustees of the American Institute in Taiwan, gave an interview to the pro-Beijing local media Television Broadcasts Satellite earlier this month, in which he warned that external forces might spread fake information to manipulate public opinion ahead of the vote. The interview was aired once and promptly deleted from the channel’s website.

The government in Beijing also knows that money talks with Taiwanese workers, including younger workers, who have faced a stagnation in real wages since manufacturing jobs — especially higher-paying ones in high-tech industries — started moving to China when it opened up its economy in the 1980s. Soon after the Sunflower Movement, Beijing began offering subsidies and preferential treatment to young Taiwanese who would go to China to work or to establish start-ups.

But it is among Taiwan’s political parties that China seems to have had most success. In just two decades, the KMT, once the staunchly anticommunist party of Chiang Kai-shek, has evolved into a deeply pro-Beijing party: It has even advocated Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland, essentially on China’s terms. Just this month, Mr. Ma, who long counted as a moderate within the KMT, switched from once standing for “no unification, no independence and no use of force” to now saying that he was “not against unification.”

Many Taiwanese say they regard themselves as only Taiwanese; just a tiny minority call themselves Chinese. And with the KMT now on the ascendancy, China may feel less need to consider a military invasion. But these factors also suggest that there will be even greater Chinese infiltration in Taiwan in the future.