Programmatically set the selected country at runtime

I can prgrammatically set a country in this way:

$('#select_country').attr('data-selected-country','CN');

before issue $('#select_country').flagStrap();
After that I'm not able to change the current country via jQuery anymore.

Would you please help me to understand how to?

[mrhewitt]

Just FYI in case anyone else has this issue, I have created a pull request that addresses this, #35