U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Taiwan's president, Tsai Ing-Wen. Photo credit: Taiwan's Central News Agency. Donald Trump, the next president of the United States, surprised Taiwanese on Dec. 2, when he tweeted about a congratulatory phone call he'd received from Taiwan's president, Tsai Ing-Wen. The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency. Thank you! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2016 Due to the “one China” policy in diplomacy, Taiwan has been isolated from the international scene for decades, at least officially. After Trump's tweet, the number of Google searches for “Taiwan” spiked worldwide, tripling in some places. Furthermore, for many people around the globe, Trump's decision to refer to Tsai as “the President of Taiwan” signals American recognition of Taiwan as an independent democratic country. Capturing the mood sarcastically in The Atlantic, Isaac Stone Fish wrote, “[T]he island once had a seat on the U.N. Security Council. Now a simple phone call with its leader is international news.” In an interview with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, Trump elaborated his position on China and Taiwan: I don't know why we have to be bound by a “one China” policy, unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade. This, again, surprised Taiwanese. For decades Beijing has used the “one China” policy to break other countries’ official ties to the Taiwanese government while they want to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. Netizens in Taiwan expressed concerns that President-elect Trump is only using their country as a negotiating chip with China, but some say the next U.S. president's scheme could give Taiwan the opportunity to improve its standing internationally. Some Taiwanese netizens complained about being bullied by the international community, following the response of the outgoing Obama administration and the world mass media to the tweet, which warned that Beijing would be enraged, and the possibility of damaging U.S.-China relationship — all before the Chinese government even issued a formal statement on Trump's comments. A sample of the headlines right after Trump's tweet. Taiwanese netizens criticized the international media for being so quick to focus on Beijing's diplomatic line without describing the voices from Taiwan. Lin Fei-fan, the co-founder of the “Taiwan March” activist group and one of the student leaders during the 2014 Sunflower Movement, wrote on Facebook after his article was published in The Washington Post: 我們在行文最後想表達的本意其實很簡單：這通電話的意義是正面的，它提供了重新檢視台美關係的機會。[…]令人遺憾的是，美國大多數一向傾向自由派的主流媒體，包括《紐約時報》、《CNN》，在第一時間，就搶在中國都還沒回應之前，就大幅度警告「此舉將會觸怒中國」。乃至近幾日的報導也環繞著中國學者、民眾的反應，卻少見來台訪問台灣人自己的看法。 What we want to express at the end of this article is very simple: The meaning of this phone call is positive, because it provides a chance to re-evaluate the Taiwan-U.S. relationship. […] It's a pity that many mainstream liberal media outlets, including The New York Times and CNN, immediately rushed to warn the world that “this will enrage China” — even before China responded to the incident. Until now, we only saw reports about the responses from Chinese scholars and citizens, and we rarely see reporters interview Taiwanese people about their opinions. Michael Turton, a popular blogger in Taiwan, also expressed his concerns about the foreign media's reactions to Trump's tweet: One way to read the media brouhaha is to observe how incompetent the media is, and how it does Beijing's work for it in referring to tensions that don't exist. […] But there's another way to think about it: the media are also signaling China about how it could/should react. If China doesn't react strongly, the media won't be validated (they will then say nothing about their failure). […] In other words, congratulations, media, you just gave China permission to go to its limit. […] China chooses actions that play the western media for publicity, but have little concrete effect. They've learned well from the international media… In the end, Beijing reacted as the mass media anticipated, except there was a small twist: the Chinese government's response to the White House was restrained, and they did not even bother arguing with the U.S. President-elected; Instead, they blamed Taiwan for what happened. On Dec. 10, Chinese military aircraft flew over the East China Sea and circled international airspace surrounding Taiwan. China's Air Force has performed similar stunts in the past one year, but the timing of this latest operation appears to be a clear response to the phone call between Trump and Tsai. Financial experts, for example, were quick to connect the two events.