The search for a middle way
THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY (CCP) has never ruled Taiwan. But how to deal with it and its insistence on eventual unification with the island has always been the central issue in Taiwan’s national politics. As campaigning begins for the presidential elections due next January, the stakes are especially high. Almost every day China sends fighter jets into the Taiwan Strait, often crossing Taiwan’s de facto maritime border; America is expanding its military bases and stepping up exercises with allies across the Indo-Pacific. The next president will take office with the island at the centre of a bubbling superpower showdown. Already, as always, the two main parties are attacking each other for provoking or appeasing Beijing. The “appeaser”, the main opposition Nationalist Party, known as the Kuomintang or KMT, calls the…