Taiwan’s ruling party has been rocked by a wave of sexual harassment allegations, as the country grapples with a #MeToo movement that has encompassed politics and the media.

On Tuesday, President Tsai Ing-wen apologised for the second time in a week in response to sexual harassment claims against senior staff in the Democratic Progressive party (DPP). “Our society as a whole must educate ourselves again. People in sexual harassment incidents are victims,” she wrote in a Facebook post.

Hours earlier, Tsai’s national policy adviser Yan Chih-fa resigned after being accused of sexually harassing an employee of a Tsai support group in 2018. Yan, who denies the allegations, also withdrew a defamation lawsuit he had filed against the complainant.

And beyond politics, on Wednesday Lee Yuan-chun, a former political worker, filed a lawsuit against Wang Dan, a former student leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, accusing him of attempted rape in 2014. The exiled Chinese dissident denied the allegations and said he had returned to Taiwan to cooperate with legal proceedings.

Wang told the Guardian he welcomed the lawsuit because “seeking the truth through legal means is a more rigorous approach than engaging in online speculations”.

In the past week there have been nearly two dozen allegations of sexual harassment against high-profile political figures. Several people have already resigned.

The latest instalment in Taiwan’s previously limited #MeToo movement was sparked by a Facebook post written on 31 May by a former DPP staffer, who said she had been sexually harassed by a director after a video shoot. Chen Qian-rou said she complained to the then head of the party’s women’s development department, Xu Jia-tian, who allegedly dismissed the issue and blamed her for not avoiding the director. Xu resigned after the post went viral.

The DPP faces a close presidential race in January. There have already been allegations that the accusers are agents of the Chinese Communist party (CCP), who would like to see Taiwan’s ruling party ousted by the Kuomintang (KMT), the main opposition party, which advocates closer ties with Beijing.

According to one flash estimate pollster, online support for the DPP plummeted by more than a third in the days after Chen’s initial Facebook post.

But the KMT has also been hit by allegations. On Saturday, Fu Kun-chi, a KMT legislator, was accused of sexually assaulting a journalist in 2014, grabbing her head and kissing her without her consent at a work dinner. Fu responded by saying he had never used his power to subordinate women.

Later that day Hou You-yi, the KMT’s presidential candidate, said he “would never allow, and would not stand by and watch, any infringement of personal autonomy, regardless of political party” and called for an investigation.

Tsai, Taiwan’s first female president, has championed the self-governing island as a beacon of social equality. Across the Taiwan strait, women in mainland China are under increased pressure to adhere to traditional gender roles to bolster China’s birthrate.

But the belated #MeToo reckoning has exposed the deeply patriarchal norms that still govern Taiwanese society. In 2021 Chen Chao-ju, a law professor at National Taiwan University, noted that in Taiwan “#MeToo has become a symbol of anti-sexual violence activism, but it has yet to produce a crystallising effect and recharge the anti-sexual violence movement … stories are told in private, with victims in the dark and perpetrators enjoying impunity”.

Bei Ling, an exiled Chinese poet, has also been accused of sexual assault by the writer of a Netflix show that has been credited with inspiring Taiwan’s #MeToo movement. Jian Li-ying accused Bei of groping her when she was a student at Chinese Culture University in Taipei. Bei has dismissed the allegations as “pure fabrication”.

Jian is now a writer on the TV show Wave Makers, a political drama set in the run-up to a Taiwanese election, in which a party staffer complains of sexual harassment. “Lets not just let this go,” says the party spokesperson in the show, a line that has become a rallying cry for Taiwan’s real-life complainants.

Prof Chen Mei-hua of the sociology department at National Sun Yat-sen University noted that while these accusations had played out in the court of public opinion, in formal legal proceedings they were unlikely to succeed. “Most cases happened many years ago, and most women do not have any evidence or witnesses,” she said. “It is almost impossible for victims to win the lawsuit.”

Additional reporting by Chi Hui Lin