From Democracy Digest:

Taiwan’s voters delivered a stinging rebuke of China’s rising authoritarianism on Saturday by re-electing President Tsai Ing-wen, who vowed to preserve the island’s sovereignty in the face of Beijing’s intensifying efforts to bring it under its control, The New York Times reports.

Taiwan’s vibrant democratic practices are a stark contrast to Beijing’s ruthless one-party rule and oppression, says Stanley Kao, the head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States. This explains why the CCP has been intensifying its efforts to meddle in Taiwan’s political process through diplomatic suppression, disinformation, infiltration and economic coercion, he writes for The Washington Post:

Freedom House’s annual report in 2019 gave Taiwan high marks as one of the freest countries in the world — at a time when there has been an alarming global decline in political rights and civil liberties over the past decade or so. The island republic’s legalization of same-sex marriage, the first in Asia, was chosen by The Post as one of 19 good things that happened in 2019. It proves that human rights and freedom of speech are not just “Western” values.

The emphatic rebuke of China’s authoritarian influence in what some observers billed as the most consequential election of 2020 drew disdain in Beijing, prompting some in Taiwan to brace for greater coercive measures from the Communist Party., The Wall Street Journal adds (HT:FDD).

Read the article here.