In a historic election in Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen has become the first woman president in the Chinese-speaking world. The result, which marks a significant political shift for the East Asian island state, also holds out important geopolitical implications. For the last eight years Taiwan’s ruling Kuomintang party has followed a policy of engagement with China that’s seen relations across the Taiwan Strait improve. But Taiwan’s own economic slowdown coupled with a growing income gap led to resentment against Kuomintang’s pro-China policies.

Against this backdrop, Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party campaigned on the platform of rejuvenating the Taiwanese identity and unfettering Taiwan from China. This, according to the Tsai camp, involves boosting Taiwan’s engagements with other Asian nations. And if Tsai does revive Taiwan’s Go South policy it will complement India’s Act East push. In fact, over the last few months many Taiwanese companies such as Foxconn and Wistron Corp have committed to increase their investments in India. Given Taiwan’s expertise in manufacturing and managing global supply chains, this is the perfect boost to the Make in India initiative.

Plus, with China’s economy also slowing and Chinese labour becoming expensive, it makes business sense for Taiwanese companies to shift their production bases to India. In that sense, India and China are competing economies while Taiwan’s high-tech industries are the perfect input for India’s low and medium manufacturing base. Even though New Delhi is used to looking back over its shoulder at Beijing for everything concerning Taiwan, there’s no reason why New Delhi and Taipei can’t enhance institutional cooperation. China has intense trade and investment relations with Taiwan, so it can’t possibly object if India adopts the same course. With the new Taiwanese leadership promising a more robust approach to the outside world, New Delhi should not fail to leverage this.