Tsai Ing-Wen foreign policy and its relationship with China and the United States

Abstract

As consequence of Tsai Ing-wen election to Taiwan's presidency, the Asian island returns to the centrality of security debates between China and the United States. The purpose of this article is to analyze how Tsai Ing-wen's developed her foreign policy towards China in the first two years of her administration. In order to explain Taiwan's diplomatic behavior, a time-series analysis was performed using Auto Regressive Vectors based on "Event Data". There is a triangular strategic interaction between the diplomatic actions of China, the United States and Taiwan. The State's actions were included in the analysis of the political entities. In addition, the days remaining for the next elections and the changes in Taiwan's financial market index were also incorporated in the explanations. Data on government acts were collected in the GDELT Project database. To complement the temporal analysis, the work also carried out a case study of the proposed period. It was found that the international variables, China and US diplomacy, were statistically significant in determining Taiwan's diplomatic actions. While domestic variables had no effect on Tsai's foreign policy.