China has plucked out another country from among Taiwan's steadily dwindling pool of diplomatic partners. The Dominican Republic announced May 1 that it had severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan and will establish them with China instead. This statement is the culmination of a long process; reports of Beijing reaching out to the Dominican Republic go back to late 2016. But the switch comes at a time when the U.S. administration appears intent on disrupting the status quo in cross-strait relations by expanding its official diplomatic interactions with Taiwan. In that sense, Taipei and Beijing's contest for diplomatic partners is just one small piece of the mounting great power competition between the United States and China....
