China tries to deepen economic ties with Taiwan yet more

EARLY THIS year China’s leader, Xi Jinping, grandly repeated his country’s longstanding vow to bring the democratic island of Taiwan back into the Chinese fold, if necessary by force. But force has never been China’s preferred option: it has long sought to integrate the Taiwanese economy with its own, in part in the hope that independence might come to seem an impossible or even undesirable goal. At times China also tries to harm the Taiwanese economy, usually to discredit governments led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which would like to abandon the official pretence that Taiwan is part of China. But all the while, the effort to bind the island to the mainland continues.