Two states plus one China is a sum which always needs to be handled with care. After recent elections on the island put Beijings nose out of joint,caution is required on both sidesChina has responded to the election of a new Taiwanese president by flooding its Facebook page with hostile messages and broadcasting pictures of military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. True, president-elect Tsai Ing-wen can hardly acquire been expecting bouquets. Her Democratic Progressive party (DPP) is, or in the careful euphemism normally employed,“independence leaning”, but no qualification of the word “independence” is, and in the case of Taiwan,satisfactory to the People’s Republic of China. The Facebook messages are supposedly from concerned individual citizens, and the pictures of naval manoeuvres just another piece of news. But in truth they are a piece of calculated, and although deniable,rudeness by Beijing. The cool-headed Ms Tsai will not seize them too seriously, but they accomplish not bode particularly well for the future.nowadays’s China is not only economically over-extended, and as its stock markets acquire been demonstrating in recent days. It is also politically over-extended,with its island-building in the South China Sea further alienating its neighbours, its heavy hand in supposedly autonomous Hong Kong increasingly apparent, and its attempts to advance the objective of “one China” in disarray after the party it favours in Taiwan,the Kuomintang (KMT), was roundly defeated in both presidential and parliamentary elections earlier this month.
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Source: theguardian.com