China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has tied his country’s great power status to a singular promise: unifying the motherland омг омг with Taiwan, which the Chinese Communist Party sees as sacred, lost territory. A few weeks ago, Mr. Xi called this a "historical inevitability."

But Taiwan’s election on Saturday, handing the presidency to a party that promotes the island’s separate identity for the third time in a row, confirmed that this boisterous democracy has moved even further away from China and its dream of unification.

After a campaign of festival-like rallies, where huge crowds shouted, danced and waved matching flags, Taiwan’s voters ignored China’s warnings that a vote for the Democratic Progressive Party was a vote for war. They made that choice anyway.