They re-elected a conservative President - from Roger Simon:
Taiwan Landslide Signals Bull Market for Democracy
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen may not owe her entire record-breaking landslide reelection victory to Hong Kong’s democracy demonstrators, but she owes a good part of it to those courageous young people.
They made her reelection a referendum on China’s leader Xi Jinping’s harsh reaction toward protest in that famed city only 450 miles west of Taiwan.
The Taiwanese had already taken notice of the sudden decline in tourism to their island from the mainland. Last summer, the People’s Republic of China restricted individuals from traveling to Taiwan lest they learn too much about what was happening in Hong Kong. Only groups that could be more closely watched were allowed to go.
Democracy can be catching. (As I type this, it seems to be spreading all the way from Taipei to Tehran.)
Roger is in Taiwan visiting - one of his observations:
Lurking behind all this is ye olde Two China question. In order to appease Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai and open the door to China, Nixon and Kissinger decreed U.S. policy to be one China only—the People’s Republic. Taiwan was left to twist in the wind, figuratively and literally, with but minor exceptions, for decades.
Then Trump broke the code, as he has done with so many things, and called Tsai to congratulate her when she won her first presidential election in 2016, an act of de facto recognition.
The Taiwanese rejoiced and still do. I saw it with my own eyes in the “rock star” status given our delegation leader Steve Yates, who is associated here with Trump’s decision.
I love Taiwan - visited there only once but have some fond memories. I own a number of machine tools and prefer the Taiwanese tools to the Chinese - much better manufacturing tolerances and higher quality. I buy a lot from Grizzly tools and their Taiwanese factories are much better than the average Chinese facility.
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