Taiwanese President-Elect Blasts China for Criticizing K-Pop Idol

In 1996, Beijing lobbed missiles into waters off Taiwan’s coast, in hopes of scuttling Lee Teng-hui’s presidential bid.

After eights years of the Nationalist party controlling the presidency, the Democratic Progressive party candidate Tsai lng-wen obtained the win after a historic one-sided election. She had been leading the opinion polls for months.

While China had largely refrained on commenting about the election beforehand, its Taiwan Affairs Office responded swiftly to the result with a statement reiterating that it would deal only with those who agree that the “two sides of the strait belong to one China”.

China claims Taiwan as a province, though the island has had an independent government for more than 50 years and many Taiwanese people consider it to be a sovereign country. Taiwanese citizens will watch Tsai closely in the coming years, seeing how she can manage to build realistic relations with the mainland.

The passage of a supervisory bill on cross-Strait exchanges, initiated in 2014 after large protests over a stalled trade pact with China, would be a legislative priority when the new parliamentary session begins in February, Tsai was quoted as saying in an interview with a Taiwanese magazine on Monday.

When Taiwan’s first-ever female president took the podium for her victory speech after Saturday’s election, she made a surprising callout: a teenage pop star who is at the center of a fierce political controversy.

Without a peaceful and stable relationship with the mainland, the article warned, the new Taiwanese government will not be able to solve domestic issues such as ensuring economic growth, the people’s livelihood, and future prospects for the young generation.

Taiwan’s president-elect Tsai Ing-wen has been warned by China not to work toward Taiwanese independence.

While The Global Times, an influential tabloid published from the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper, said in an editorial that if Tsai’s administration sought to “cross the red line” like Chen, Taiwan would “meet a dead end”. The principle is the bedrock of warming ties between the KMT and Beijing, enshrined in a tacit agreement between them known as the “1992 consensus”. It most certainly will affect cross-strait and U.S.-China relations given the sensitivity of the issue of Taiwan’s sovereignty.

As an East Asian politics professor from Davidson College told The New York Times: “Tsai Ing-wen doesn’t want this to blow up. Voters and other stakeholders are assuming that she will be able to manage the relationship in a way that China will react not negatively, but again we should always prepare for the worst”, says Feingold.

“To handle cross-Taiwan Strait relations after Tsai’s election will be hard, not just for Taiwan but also for mainland China”, said Huang Jing, a China expert at Singapore National University’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.