cheering tsai's predecessor, president ma ying—jeou, cheering tsai's predecessor, president ma ying—jeoutried to negotiate with china, even holding a meeting with president xi jinping in singapore. tsai's strategy has been completely different. instead of trying to conciliate china, she's built up taiwan's own defences. nearly doubling spending, buying new fighterjets and developing taiwan's first indigenous submarines. today, the lion dance is to celebrate the opening of a new special forces training base on the outskirts of taipei. another tangible example of where this new military spending is going. so i guess for president tsai, this is a sort of demonstration of what she's been trying to achieve in defence policy over the last eight years, because, you know, part of her big thing is taiwan doesn't spend enough on defence. when she came in, it was about 2% of gdp. she's managed to push that up to about 2.5% of gdp. a lot of people say taiwan needs to be spending north of 3% of its gdp to have an effective military, given the huge threat that it faces from china. one of the things yo