Taiwan After the Election

Scott Ritter- The citizens of Taiwan went to the polls in January to elect a new president and parliament.

The citizens of Taiwan went to the polls in January to elect a new president and parliament. The stakes were, literally, existential — with Zhang Zhijun, the head of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, who also led Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office from 2013-18, having declared that the elections presented “important choices between the prospects for peace and war, prosperity and decline.” The eventual winner in the presidential race — the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Lai Ching-te — beat Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and Hou Yu-ih of the Nationalist Party (Kuomingtang, or KMT). Given the anti-mainland policies of the incumbent president, Tsai Ing-wen (who, like Lai Ching-te, is a member of the DPP), conventional wisdom holds that Taiwan’s new president will continue a policy line of de facto independence from China that has pushed the two nations to the brink of war. But a closer look shows that the elections have set Taiwan on a very difficult path, where its new president will have to deal with deeply entrenched Chinese intransigence and the probability of domestic political infighting — in what will likely prove four difficult years of governance.

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https://thealtworld.com/scott_ritter/taiwan-after-the-election