Taiwan's presidential elections are next March which means we can expect some Chinese missile testing to arrive also. What's surprising this time round, however, is that the ex-president, 80 year-old Lee Teng-Hui has been actively campaigning for Taiwanese independence. Lee was chairman of the Nationalist Party, the intractable former ruling party that insisted for more than 50 years that it was the rightful government of all of China. The Washington Post had a nice profile of him this weekend.
For those not in the know, Taiwan is a country floating in diplomatic limbo since mainland China won't allow any state to recognize the sovereignty of this island. Up until Nixon's visit to China in 1972, the United States recognized Taiwan as the official government of China. Now none of the world's major powers have official relations with Taiwan, a country with a population of about 23 million people.
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