Taiwan’s DPP prioritises transparent China relations

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

It is not the first time Ms Tsai has been on the receiving end of a barrage of Facebook posts from across the Taiwan Straight, or the first time she has appeared to welcome it. “It is also a landmark in the democratic history of Taiwan that Your Excellency is first female elected to the office of the Presidency”, Mr Topgyal, the Tibetan Parliament secretary wrote.

It’s a sign that Beijing, at least for now, doesn’t want to further alienate Taiwanese, who voted by wide margins for Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Beijing needs to keep up its dialogue with Taiwan under Tsai’s leadership and seek to build a new, mutually acceptable foundation for cross-strait relations.

Now that Taiwan has voted, Beijing also has a choice to make: how it will respond to the definitive ouster of the KMT, its preferred partner for cross-strait relations.

“After the DPP lost power to the Nationalist Party in 2008, she became driven by a sense of mission, with supporters looking to her to revive a party that believes in Taiwan’s status as an independent entity”, said James Huang, director of the DPP’s department of worldwide affairs.

However, there are changes in store for the cross-strait relationship.

The U.S.is Taiwan’s most important ally and source of defensive arms.

The DPP’s dominance in all of Taiwan’s major population centers underscores a growing consensus on the island that its political identity is separate from China, even though the government now exists within the framework of the Constitution of the Republic of China as designed by the KMT and imported from the Chinese mainland in 1949. She’s refused to embrace the so-called 1992 Consensus, under which the two sides agreed that there was only “one China” but disagreed about what that meant.

A state-run television network in China reported Wednesday that a live-fire drill had been conducted recently by the Chinese military off China’s southeast coast, the first report of a military exercise following Taiwan’s presidential and legislative elections last week. In other cases, such as a mainland-target program of the TSMC (Taiwan Science Manufacturing Company), have already passed legally, and are therefore less policy-involved. “There will be substantial consultations with all sides”.

Still, some sort of shake-up is likely, observers say. In her victory speech Saturday, she said: “The results today tell me that the people want to see a government more willing to listen to the people, a government that is more transparent and accountable, and a government that is more capable of leading us past our current challenges and taking care of those in need”.

“Many parts of Southeast Asia are looking up to Taiwan as an example of free and fair elections”, he said.

“Taiwanese people are very peaceful”.