Taiwan elects pro-independence party into government

This common sentiment helped to propel Tsai Ing-wen, leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, into power in the presidential election on January 16.

Just hours after Taiwan elected a new president Chinese state media has warned the island state off any independence rhetoric.

He said Beijing was waiting for Tsai to clearly declare her stance on the “1992 consensus”, an understanding the mainland has used to test whether Tsai is abiding by the “one China” principle.

“If there is no peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan’s new authority will find the sufferings of the people it wishes to resolve on the economy, livelihood and its youth will be as useless as looking for fish in a tree”, it said.

“Who knows whether those justice fighters will repeat what Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party’s combative legislators did in storming parliament to prevent a bill from being passed”, a former Kuomintang legislator said in jest.

Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan’s main opposition party sent a warning to China after a landslide victory to become the island’s first female president on Sunday, as voters turned their backs on closer ties with Beijing. “We share with the Taiwan people a profound interest in the continuation of cross-strait peace and stability”, the statement from US State Department spokesman John Kirby said.

Tsai’s DPP also gained an absolute majority in Taiwan’s legislature amassing 68 seats out 113 giving her administration an upper-hand in terms of policy-making over the next four years.

China’s foreign ministry told Xinhua: “There is only one China in the world, the mainland and Taiwan both belong to one China and China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity will not brook being broken up”. “The government of Japan will work toward further deepening cooperation and exchanges between Japan and Taiwan”, it added.

Tsai has been thrust into one of Asia’s toughest and most unsafe jobs, with China pointing hundreds of missiles at the island it claims, decades after the losing Nationalists fled from Mao Zedong’s Communists to Taiwan in the Chinese civil war in 1949.

She met Ohashi behind closed doors and the DPP later issued a statement quoting Tsai as saying that “she was joyful that friends from Japan maintained good ties with the DPP even during the party’s most hard times in the past eight years”.