Taipei: On Houyan Island in China’s Pingtan County on a breezy afternoon, Chinese students, tourists and fishermen looked through binoculars across the Taiwan Strait. Exactly 68 nautical miles away, up to 14 million people were voting in Taiwan’s presidential elections for the eighth time since it became a democracy in 1996.

The loss of the island after the end of the Chinese civil war seven decades ago still provokes a visceral reaction in the mainland. That embarrassment has been fuelled even further by Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party government now winning a presidential election three times in a row through campaigns that specifically attacked Beijing and its plans to unify with the island.

Taiwan’s President-elect Lai Ching-te celebrates after winning the vote on Saturday night. Credit: Daniel Ceng

The campaigns have been led for the past eight years by President Tsai Ing-wen, a bookish bureaucrat who will now leave office in May as one of the world’s great leaders: the first female president of Taiwan and the first leader of a Taiwanese party to win three democratically elected terms. In short, everything Beijing is not.

“Whenever I see that woman surnamed Tsai, I feel bad,” said Li Meisong, 60, a seafood stall owner in mainland Pingtan as Taiwan voted on Saturday. “I hate her.”

That hatred will now transfer to her successor, Lai Ching-te, the former physician and mayor who became Tsai’s vice-president before winning 40 per cent of the presidential vote on Saturday night, ahead of the Kuomintang’s candidate, Hou Yu-ih, with 33.5 per cent, and 26.5 per cent for the Taiwan People’s Party’s Ko Wen-je.

Li Meisong, a fisherman in Pingtan, wants Taiwan and China to be united. Credit: Sanghee Liu

Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office seized on the result to claim the DPP “cannot represent the mainstream public opinion on the island” because it only secured 40 per cent of the vote.

The one-party state is not familiar with Taiwan’s first-past-the-post presidential voting system, but its problems run deeper than that.

“This election can’t change the basic pattern and development direction of cross-strait relations, the common aspiration of compatriots on both sides of the strait to get closer and closer,” said Chen Binhua, a spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council of China.