As political transitions go, the ascent of Lai Ching-te to the presidency of Taiwan had pretty much everything. On May 15, the outgoing President signed off amid a riot of yellow spandex and feather boas as Nymphia Wind, winner of the latest season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, led drag queens through the Presidential Office Building. Two days later a real riot erupted in Taiwan’s legislature as lawmakers traded insults and punches over a bill that would heighten scrutiny powers over the government, and tens of thousands protested in the street. When Lai, who also goes by the anglicized name William, finally took office, on May 20, his inauguration speech so riled Beijing that it dispatched fighter jets and warships in “punishment” exercises designed to demonstrate its ability to “seize power.”
“So it has been a very smooth transition,” Lai tells TIME, with a straight face, in his first interview as President. “So far so good.”
A stoic embrace of peril and pandemonium is perhaps essential for the leader of a vibrant, febrile democracy—not least one perched beside an authoritarian superpower determined to bring it to heel. Taiwan became politically self-ruling in 1949 at the end of China’s civil war. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has never controlled the island of 23 million, which still officially uses the archaic title Republic of China (ROC). But Chinese President Xi Jinping considers it a renegade province whose “reunification” is a “historical inevitability” and has repeatedly threatened force to achieve it.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) sent 1,709 warplanes through Taiwan’s air-defense identification zone last year. For Lai’s saying in his address that the governments of Beijing and Taipei “are not
