President William Lai (賴清德) on Tuesday gave the second of a series of 10 talks that he plans to deliver across Taiwan. The talk came with few surprises, and not just because of the use of the usual platitudes of national unity.
Lai’s approach to both the opposition in Taiwan — the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) — and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China has been to hold out olive branches tinged with an implicit critique: a call for consensus, but also a caution that he will compromise only so far.