Kaohsiung Mayor-elect Chen Chi-mai is set to take office next Monday. Last week, Chen won a mayoral by-election with 70% of the vote. Opposition KMT candidate Li Mei-jhen secured just 26% of the vote, followed in third place by the Taiwan People’s Party’s Wu Yi-jheng, with just 4%.

Chen’s landslide win is hardly surprising given that he is more experienced than the other two and went into the election armed with vast political resources. However, the ballots he received 70,000 fewer ballots last week than he was able to muster back in 2018, his first attempt to win the mayor’s office. Voter turnout, at 42%, was disappointing too.

In his victory speech, Chen promised to build a strong team and emphasize economic structural transformation. That’s because the southern port city has long focused on manufacturing industries such as petrochemicals, iron, and steel-making. Chen hopes to turn Kaohsiung instead into a high-end manufacturing center, as well as an advanced center for processing semiconductors, with an emphasis on the 5G and the semiconductor industries.