Taiwan president attacked for being single

Taiwan’s new president is “extreme” in her politics, because she’s an unmarried woman who lacks the emotional balance provided by family life, a member of China’s body for relations with the self-governing island has written in a newspaper.

In Beijing’s harshest attack on Tsai Ing-wen, since her inauguration last week, the new president was denounced as a flawed human and as a strident advocate of Taiwan’s formal independence from China, which Beijing says it will use military force to prevent.

Tsai, Taiwan’s first female president, has been criticised by Beijing for refusing to endorse the ‘one-China principle’ that defines Taiwan as part of China.

But previous criticisms were not as personal.

“Analysed from the human angle, as a single female politician, she lacks the emotional encumbrance of love, the constraints of family, or the worries of children,” said the piece, written by Wang Weixing, an analyst with China’s People’s Liberation Army and board member of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, the semiofficial body in charge of contacts with Taiwan.

“Her style and strategy, in pursuing politics, constantly skew toward the emotional, personal, and extreme,” Wang wrote, adding that Tsai focused excessively on details and short-term goals