Tsai's Re-election Poses Challenge to Beijing

Tsai's winning smile after solidifying her re-election for the next four years

As expected, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen was relected by a huge margin with over 8 million votes, while her challenger, Han Kuo-yu the Kuomintang Kaohsiung mayor only mustered 3 million ballots.

"I also hope that the Beijing authorities understand that democratic Taiwan, and our democratically elected government, will not concede to threats and intimidation," Tsai said. She added cross-strait relations should be based in "peace, equality, democracy and dialogue".

Han ran on platform of closer times to China for prosperity

This was not the result Beijing was expecting -- it had pinned its hopes on Han, but the seeing how the Hong Kong protests were handled and the reports on how Uighurs are treated in Xinjiang resulted in a big blow for the motherland hoping to move one step closer towards reunification.

While Xinhua only reported on the result of the elections, Beijing quickly spun the result as seeing Tsai's win as a setback and not a crisis. Therefore Beijing will continue to put pressure on Taiwan, but at the same time will adopt a wait-it-out strategy.

Although China has banned mainland tourists from visiting Taiwan as individual travelers and must join a tour group instead, the election results show the Taiwanese don't seem to mind how this has had a knock-on effect on their economy. In fact the island has had its lowest unemployment in decades and has strong export growth.

The election was a referendum on for or against China

The election was basically a referendum on if people were anti- or pro-China. The former won by a landslide.

So let's see... Hong Kong's district council elections were predominantly yellow and now Taiwan's is a strong green for the Democratic Progressive Party, how does Beijing plan to turn both of them red at this rate?