Beijing: China's internet censors have taken the unusual step of scrubbing an editorial from one of its own official newspapers after the piece prompted outrage online for suggesting Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen was prone to "emotional" and "extreme" political views because she is unmarried and without children.
"As a single female politician, [Ms Tsai] does not have the emotional burden of love, the pull of 'family', of children," wrote the piece's author, Wang Weixing, who is a council member of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits, a semi-official mainland body handling cross-strait relations.
"Her political and management style tends to lean toward the emotional, personal and extreme."
Mr Wang's op-ed was published in the International Herald Leader, a newspaper run under the auspices of the official Xinhua news agency.
Re-posts of the piece online, including on Xinhua's website and several popular online news portals, were deleted on Wednesday as criticism of the piece's misogynist bent gained traction.
The controversial and personal attack – the piece also delved into her dating history and family background, going as far as to suggest the fact her father had four wives had made Ms Tsai insecure – has been part of a sustained volley of negative articles carried in the state media aimed at Taiwan's president since her inauguration speech last Friday.
Having swept to power on the promise of keeping mainland influence on Taiwan in check, Ms Tsai failed to directly acknowledge the so-called "1992 Consensus" and "One-China principle" in her carefully-worded speech. Beijing has threatened to suspend talks with Taiwan until she changes her stance.
China's Taiwan affairs office subsequently said in a statement that Ms Tsai's comments showed her "ambiguous attitude" toward the "fundamental issue" of the cross-strait relationship. "This is not a complete answer," the statement said.
While nationalistic netizens have previously flooded Ms Tsai's official Facebook page with anti-independence messages, the reaction to the International Herald Leader's op-ed was overwhelmingly negative, with many comments comparing the piece to North Korean state media's often lewd and misogynistic attacks on South Korean President Park Geun-hye.
"For this kind of naked discrimination against single women to be endorsed by Xinhua … you can attack her political ideas, her governing style, but please don't make a big deal purely based on her gender," said one post on Weibo, a Chinese-language equivalent to Twitter.
