To celebrate Lantern Festival, which fell on Tuesday this year, the city of Kaohsiung on Taiwan island lit up the sky with a drone display to thank the island's secession-desiring administration's "friends" — including Lithuania, Japan and the United States — for their help in its "time of need".

Yet, none of the help these "friends" have provided the island — be it setting up a so-called "Taiwan representative office" in Vilnius, showing officious concerns for its security or directly selling it weapons — serves the interests of the Taiwan people, which hinge on harmonious relations across the Taiwan Straits.

And by recklessly emboldening the secession-desiring Democratic Progressive Party administration on the island to intensify its provocations, none of the three countries has faithfully honored the commitment they have made to the one-China principle, which is the foundation of their diplomatic relations with the Chinese mainland.

There are many different reasons why crises and conflicts begin. But often the cause is simply a desire on the part of one party or another to put fortune to the test. And that is the prevailing impression of what is motivating the Tsai Ing-wen administration and its "friends" to keep aggravating cross-Straits tensions.

The escalating cross-Straits tensions, if unchecked, will have damaging repercussions on the global economy given the region's irreplaceable role as a major manufacturing base, consumption market, logistics center and growth engine, and even risk sparking a war.

The ridiculous pantomimes staged by the Tsai administration and its friends are intended to prove that Beijing's redline is pliable and can serve their respective agendas without being broken.

But the one-China principle is China's bottom line and there is no elasticity in that. The Tsai administration and its "friends" should not mistake Beijing's desire for peaceful reunification as weakness.

The provocative moves to push the envelope on the one-China principle are in defiance of the broad consensus held by the international community and dangerously shortsighted, since none of the planners, plotters and perpetrators can foretell the broader consequences.

And even if nothing seems to be going on, the costs continue to rise nevertheless, most obviously for people on the island who are paying a growing price for the games the Tsai administration is playing with its "friends".

The great lengths Tsai has gone to fawn upon her "friends" each time they have supported one of her administration's provocative moves lays bare the nature of the "friendship", which is simply self-serving and in total disregard of the interests of Taiwan people.