A “dangerous separatist”, as China calls William Lai, will be Taiwan’s next president, which means the arsenal that Beijing deployed, including military exercises and propaganda, failed to make a difference. There is a growing body of people in Taiwan who now feel that they have a separate identity which is not identical to that of the mainland, says former Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale. “Today you have a position in which China has no option but to deal with its worst case scenario for the next four years, at least in political terms,” he told StratNews Global Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale. In the interview, Vijay Gokhale also talks about his latest book ‘Crosswinds: Nehru, Zhou and the Anglo-American Competition over China’ that offers insights into Indian foreign policy in the first decade after Independence and why India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, did what he did when it came to dealing with China and the United States.
