TheEconomistJuly 27th 2019 191F
ollowing a dismalwinter you can’t
count on a good summer, yet Tsai Ing-
wen is making hay. Early in the year, Tai-
wan’s president had appeared mired in
gloom. Ordinary Taiwanese were disillu-
sioned with her stewardship of the econ-
omy. Her Democratic Progressive Party
(dpp) had fared so badly in municipal elec-
tions that she felt compelled to step down
as party leader. To compound it all, Xi Jinp-
ing, China’s ruler, had made it clear that
China, which claims Taiwan as its own and
which has ostracised Ms Tsai and her inde-
pendence-leaning party, was in no mind to
make life easier for her or for Taiwan.
What a difference a few months make.
First, Ms Tsai emerged surprisingly strong-
ly from a primary contest in which she beat
off William Lai Ching-te, the former mayor
of Tainan, who challenged her to be the dpp
candidate to contest the next presidential
election. The primary, curiously, is decided
by taking opinion polls of voters. Some ex-
perts suspect Ms Tsai’s camp of massaging
the outcome. But there is no doubt that MsTsai’s firm support for pro-democracy prot-
ests currently roiling Hong Kong (see Chi-
na section) boosted her standing at home.
She has since welcomed several dozen
Hong Kong protesters who reportedly in-
tend to seek political asylum in Taiwan. By
contrast, the protests have thrown the op-
position Kuomintang (kmt), which is con-
ciliatory towards China, off balance.
With a fair wind at her back, Ms Tsai
breezed off to America on July 11th. Her
two-day stay in New York, complete with a
ferry ride near the Statue of Liberty, was in-
tended to ooze normality, but visits by
presidents of Taiwan are unusual and
heavily circumscribed. The country has no
formal diplomatic relations with America,
along with the many other nations that ac-
knowledge the “one-China principle” in-
sisted upon in Beijing. Officially, Ms Tsai
was en route to a handful of diplomatic al-
lies in the Caribbean. But her stay was one
of the longest that America has granted to a
leader of the robustly democratic island.
China thundered in vain that Americashould cancel her visit, during which she
met members of Congress and delivered a
speech at Columbia University in defence
of liberal, democratic values. “Taiwan is
not, and will not be, intimidated,” she said
at a reception in New York with representa-
tives of Taiwan’s 17 remaining diplomatic
allies. Her Caribbean visit was book-ended
by a further two days in Colorado.
It all signals an unusual degree of ap-
proval by champions of democracy in Con-
gress and by China hawks in Donald
Trump’s administration. They have seen
tensions with China rise over trade and
cyber-security. Taiwan, too, faces increas-
ing military and diplomatic pressure over
Ms Tsai’s refusal to accept that her island is
part of the Chinese motherland. A Chinese
defence white paper this week repeated
China’s threat of the use of force to prevent
Taiwan’s independence. Yet Ms Tsai has
been at pains not wantonly to rile China,
unhinge relations across the Taiwan Strait
and so risk dragging America into a danger-
ous conflict.
Marks of strengthening relations with
Taiwan have mostly been small yet sym-
bolic. On a previous transit in Houston, Ms
Tsai visited nasa, becoming the first Tai-
wanese leader to set foot in an American
federal agency since 1979, when America
broke off diplomatic relations in favour of
China. In May Mr Trump’s national securi-
ty adviser, John Bolton, met his Taiwanese
counterpart, David Lee, another first.Taiwan’s presidentShine on
TAIPEI
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