Beijing Benefits from Taiwan’s Troubles

Taiwan has endured a wretched year, despite the early exhilaration (in some circles, at least) that greeted the election of the first opposition candidate to Taiwan’s presidency in March 2000. Nothing has seems to have gone right ever since. To those steeped in Chinese tradition, the seemingly never-ending parade of typhoons, floods, earthquakes, fires, landslides and offshore oil spills that Taiwan has borne of late are omens symbolizing the loss of the Mandate of Heaven – which means that the ultimate “Powers That Be” have determined that the current regime is unfit to rule.