Taiwan Deserves Better Than Trump's Drive-By

(Reuters Breakingviews) - On the third floor of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, visitors queue for half an hour to see a head of cabbage carved in green and white jadeite. The sculpture, with a locust munching its leaves, is one of thousands of precious artworks that traveled to Taiwan along with Chiang Kai-shek's retreating Kuomintang army at the end of the Chinese civil war. The wait is about half as long as it was before the Taiwanese election, a museum guide tells me. Since taking office in May, President Tsai Ing-wen has refused to reaffirm the "One China" policy, effectively a belief that the two countries will one day reunite. Best not to talk about it, however: it has kept relative peace in the region for a generation. In retaliation, Beijing cut the flow of tour groups to the Republic of China, Taiwan's formal name after Generalissimo Chiang fled with his defeated Kuomintang in 1949 after Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party chased him off the mainland.