IT WAS a landslide that will change Taiwanese politics and could affect China, too. Tsai Ing-wen, the presidential candidate of Taiwan’s independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), had been expected to win the presidential election held on January 16th. She had been leading the opinion polls for months. But the scale of her victory still came as a surprise. Ms Tsai won 56% of the vote, becoming the island’s first female leader. More striking still, in elections held on the same day to the parliament, called the Legislative Yuan, her party won 68 of the 113 seats up for grabs, compared with only 35 for the ruling Kuomintang (KMT; see graphic). It is the first time since Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan in 1949 that the KMT and its allies have lost their grip on parliament. It plunges relations with China into doubt: the mainland has not ruled out the use of force to retake the 23m-strong island should it ever declare independence.
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