Chiang Ying-ying/AP

China views Taiwan as a renegade province, reinforced by Taiwan’s former president, Ma Ying-jeou, who regularly implied it was part of China.
Once Tsai Ing-wen, of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), became President of Taiwan in 2016, Beijing has feared Taiwan is inching toward independence.
Beijing also worries about Trump‘s motivation for improving relations between the United States and Taiwan.
Taiwan and the United States must prepare for greater hostility from China in the coming years, likely to last until the next Taiwan presidential election in 2020 or longer.

Just hours after staging the largest display of naval forces in its history in the South China Sea on April 12, China announced that it would abruptly pivot to conducting live-fire military drills in the Taiwan Strait six days later. The bombastic exercises went ahead — and Beijing followed up with several recent bomber flights around the self-governing island as well.

According to the Chinese nationalist tabloid Global Times, Beijing felt compelled to proceed with the exercises to “check ‘Taiwan independence'” and because “the US has been containing China on the Taiwan question.” And it’s been exactly Beijing’s perception or misperception of these two factors — the political status of Taiwan and how close Taipei and Washington have become — that have come to dominate cross-strait relations in recent months, substantially raising the risk of military conflict.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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