Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen wants to recover rival Kuomintang assets, report says

Taiwan’s President-elect Tsai Ing-wen has not only broken the gender barrier to win the highest office in the land, but she is also the first woman without any political lineage in Asia to head a government.

Taiwan’s freewheeling democracy stands in sharp contrast to China’s one-party state, and a cast of colorful candidates are contesting seats. As the Christian Science Monitor notes, China still maintains hundreds of missile pointing at Taiwan and the two sides exchanged fire in the 1970s over precisely the issue of Taiwanese sovereignty. “This is very bad news”, said Steve Lin, first deputy minister of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, the ministry in charge of China affairs. He was lauded for helping get Taiwan through the crisis, and Tsai cited this accomplishment during the presidential campaign.

However, the president-elect said throughout her campaign she would avoid upsetting China and not try to break away legally to back up the island’s de facto autonomy.

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) spokesman Ruan Chao-hsiung said Chinese internet users were just “exercising their freedom of speech”. “You people have none of that”, wrote one.

China, then, can be perceived as being a threat to Taiwan’s trade economy as well as an opportunity, and Beijing has already sent rhetorical warning shots across the Strait, with government organ Xinhua demanding that Taiwan abandon the “hallucination” of independence in the aftermath of the election result. Symbolic of the growing discontent of Taiwan’s voters against the policy were the five seats in Parliament gained in Saturday’s election by a new political party which grew out of the student protest movement against Ma’s trade pact with China in 2014.

“If Beijing can adjust its strategy and Tsai is willing to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping half way, a mutual accommodation between them is not impossible”, Mr. Bush wrote in a blog post. On top of that, the Taiwanese people were angered by a video released hours before the election of a teenage pop star apologizing, under China’s pressure, for waving a Taiwanese flag.

A month and a half later, the Obama administration approved the first USA arms sales to Taiwan in four years.

Making that happen, however, will not be easy, and Beijing’s perception of the meaning of this election will be important.

Beijing believes that legal independence is the goal of Tsai and her party, and it demands that she accommodates China by accepting certain principles as the basis for sustaining stable and productive cross-Strait relations.

Talks might restart after the inauguration of the new leadership on May 20.

He joined the Taiwan Affairs Office, which is in charge of policy toward the island and relations with it, in 2013, having previously spent his entire working career with the Fujian government, according to his official biography.

Joseph Wu, the secretary-general of the DPP, said in remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., that Beijing’s comments on cross-strait relations (both before and after the election) had been “relatively reserved”.

“In my entire life, I have been hoping that there are good statesmen in Taiwan, instead of politicians”, Chen said, defining a statesman as a person who thinks of people’s needs and can resolve people’s problems with sound policies and firm action.

Late on Wednesday, Chinese state television said the 31st Group Army, based in China’s southeastern city of Xiamen, opposite Taiwan, had carried out the drills in “recent days”.