PRESIDENT Lee Teng-hui yesterday celebrated his overwhelming win in Taiwan's presidential election with a verbal attack on China, but Taipei and Beijing still held out the prospect of peace talks.
A jubilant Mr Lee appeared at a tea party for Taiwanese who returned from overseas to vote and took up the assault on China for staging military exercises to scare Taiwan.
"The Chinese communists, in their barbaric and unreasonable posture, staged a series of military exercises and increased their military threats to try to influence our presidential elections," Mr Lee declared.
He said the intimidation had the world over and increased "the determination of all of you to return to the country to vote and to show your support to the implementation of democratic politics".
In spite of a series of intimidatory war games and missile tests off Taiwan, Mr Lee (73) won 54 per cent of the vote to get a new four year term in the island's first filly democratic presidential election on Saturday.
China launched a vitriolic personal campaign against Mr Lee, whom it accuses of seeking an independent Taiwan, in what was seen as an attempt to put voters off the leader of the ruling Kuomintang party. But both sides still attempted to keep the door open for future dialogue.
Mr Lien Chan, Taiwan's current Prime Minister and Vice President elect, said at a victory celebration: "We have been seriously considering a peace agreement."
China, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province, in turn repeated an offer by President Jiang Zemin for a summit, through a Beijing controlled Hong Kong newspaper, the Wen Wei Po.
The success of any reconciliation attempt between the cross Strait rivals would depend on Taiwan's leaders giving up efforts to promote independence, a Beijing Foreign Ministry official warned.
However the official reaction in Beijing was less damning than usual, not repeating the usual attack on Mr Lee.
The official Xinhua news agency, quoting an unnamed official at the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office, announced Mr Lee's victory as a "leadership change in the Taiwan region".
In Taiwan, trucks manned by Lee supporters toured the streets of main cities thanking voters with loudspeaker messages.
Mr Lee won 5,813,699 of the 10,883,279 votes cast. He defeated three other candidates, including Mr Peng Ming min of the pro independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) who won around 21 per cent of the vote to come second.
China's latest war games are due to end today. But they have been restricted by bad weather since starting last week and residents on the Chinese mainland said there had been little sign of them during the weekend.
Analysts said Mr Lee's victory was due in part to his success in turning the crisis brought on by China's military intimidation into unified support for him. Many Taiwanese agreed that the military action had strengthened support for Mr Lee.