Pro-China posts flood Taiwan President-elect Tsai’s Facebook

Chairperson and presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen waves as she arrives at the headquarters of DPP, following the DPP’s victory in Saturday’s presidential and parliamentary elections, in Taipei, January 18, 2016. Despite the most formidable economic relationship between Beijing and Taipei (Taiwan’s capital), and a meeting in Singapore with their respective heads of state (Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou), there is no further advantage for 25 million Taiwanese to be absorbed by 1.4 billion mainland Chinese.

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), meanwhile, has urged China to “adopt a rational and realistic” attitude toward Taiwan’s elections because “it is the duty of both sides of the Taiwan Strait to maintain peace”. Moreover, the electorate resisted the KMT’s new generation of leaders like Eric Chu and Hau Lung-pin.

None of this means that China’s government will take a hardline posture with Tsai, or that cross-Strait relations will inevitably decline. “We’ve lived through war, and it was not easy”, said Chen, 83, a military veteran who declined to give his full name.

While the focus may be on policy failures, the real reason that Taiwanese voters rejected the Nationalists lies in the fundamental difference between Taiwan’s thriving democracy and China’s autocratic one-party communist system that Beijing has refused to reform despite sweeping social and economic changes, said Zhang Lifan, a Beijing-based historian and independent commentator.

They include an ex-convict, an alleged spy and the front man of Asia’s biggest death metal band.

The president-elect was also unperturbed by media questions about the mainland Chinese authorities exerting more pressure on her to uphold the “1992 Consensus”.

In her victory speech on Saturday, Tsai said she wanted good relations with China, indicated she was prepared to meet Beijing halfway and would avoid any provocations. Responding to official complaints towards DPP for not forming a cabinet beforehand, he notes that Tsai doesn’t have any power on major policies before her inauguration on May 20.

“This particular incident will serve as a constant reminder to me about the importance of our country’s strength and unity to those outside our borders. He can’t let people think that his own policy direction is the failure”, said Alexander Huang, a political scientist at Taiwan’s Tamkang University. Some of the Facebook warrior-commenters are young Chinese students studying in foreign countries, including but not limited to the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

A senior official of the independence-leaning party that swept Taiwan’s elections says the new government will carefully manage relations with mainland China and wants Washington to keep encouraging reconciliation. “We hope and believe that the global community will adhere to the One-China Principle, stand against any forms of ‘Taiwan independence, ‘ and support, with concrete actions, the peaceful development of the cross-Strait relations”. “Taiwanese should be very proud”.