Taiwan party that won election wants US help with China

It will be tough for the future Tsai administration to predict the behaviour of Beijing who may see Tsai’s United Nations policy as a challenge to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait – defined unilaterally by Beijing.

Numerous posts were written in the simplified Chinese characters used on the mainland – whereas Taiwan and Hong Kong still write in traditional characters – and many repeated a standard Communist Party refrain about how shameful it is to harm the motherland. The decline in support for the KMT is largely the result of the party’s failure to tackle many local issues, including economic stagnation, deterioration of the investment climate and little increase in people’s incomes.

The channel broadcast images of amphibious armoured vehicles ploughing through the sea towards a landing site, helicopters firing missiles at shore locations and soldiers parachuting down from helicopters.

CCTV7 said the drills were staged by the 31st Group Army based in Xiamen near the Taiwanese-held island of Kinmen, considered one of the People’s Liberation Army’s “frontline” units for any action regarding Taiwan.

Kuo Tai-chiang, director of the Taiwan Electrical and Electronic Association (TEEMA), also calls for Tsai Ing-wen to form a cabinet for preventing idle running within the 120 days. There was some cause for optimism that Beijing will opt for the latter, given the TAO’s comment that it will pursue relations with any party that acknowledges “one China” – potentially leaving the door open for an alternative formula that somehow satisfies both sides. Ms Tsai should swiftly demonstrate to President Xi Jinping that her priority is not to seek to upset the balance across the strait but to take on domestic concerns: build more affordable housing, fix the crisis in the pensions system and raise the minimum wage.

Whoever is in power in Taiwan, be it the Kuomintang or the Democratic Progressive Party, it is important to consider that the victim in any cross-strait conflict would be Taiwan, not the US.

Jia, who was also in Taiwan observing the election, said he is not planning to publish his articles on the Chinese domestic media because “the things I wanted to write is beyond what is acceptable by the Chinese media”.

It is not clear how Tsai’s government would negotiate with China.

Access to Facebook and most major Western social media sites is banned in mainland China, but technically savvy users often circumvent the restrictions – an irony not lost on Taiwanese Facebook posters, who sarcastically congratulated the mainland critics on bypassing their censors.

Another took a more combative tone.

Lin Por-fong, chairperson at the Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce (CNAIC), says the government should avoid a window period in operations and that the new government should cooperate with the current one, forming a coalition cabinet. Some taunted the island to declare formal independence so Beijing has an “excuse to annihilate the bandits”.

A third asked separatists to leave Taiwan.

It was a repeat of a similar incident back in November. “The Nationalists bungled their response to it, and Tsai Ing-wen was the only one to profit”.

The president-elect herself posted on Thursday: “The greatness of this country is that everyone has their own rights”.

Taiwanese people reacted similarly, pointing out that they enjoyed freedoms that mainlanders lack. “We will not be divided by an election”, she said during her victory speech Saturday. “We’ll have good relations with leaders in the region”. Indeed, the researchers found that the Chinese tourists were highly supportive of tourism development and generally perceived it as beneficial for improving relations between the two places.