China, Taiwan shake hands after 66 years
SINGAPORE—Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou shook hands and smiled broadly yesterday as they opened a historic summit, the first since the two sides’ traumatic 1949 split following a civil war.
“No force can pull us apart,” Xi told Ma as they opened the one-hour meeting. “We are one family.”
Ma responded by telling Xi the two sides should observe mutual respect after decades of hostility and rivalry, but that the “fruits of conciliation” lay ahead.
“Even though this is the first meeting, we feel like old friends. Behind us is history stretching for 60 years. Now before our eyes there are fruits of conciliation instead of confrontation,” he said. The pair opened the encounter with an extended handshake, beaming and waving to a huge pack of assembled media.
No agreements
No agreements or joint statements are expected from the encounter between two sides that still refuse to formally recognize each other’s legitimacy, and the meeting’s lasting significance remains to be seen.
But the encounter is undeniably historic: the previous occasion was in 1945, when Communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong met with China’s Nationalist President Chiang Kai-shek in a failed reconciliation attempt.
The later Communist takeover forced Chiang’s armies and about two million followers to flee to Taiwan, then a backwater island province, leaving a national rupture that has preoccupied both sides ever since.
Warming ties
A hostile standoff ensued for decades, and the Taiwan Strait between them remains one of the world’s last remaining Cold War-era flash points.
Over the years, however, Chinese economic pragmatism allowed cross-strait business and investment ties to flourish despite the official hostility.
Since taking office in 2008, Ma’s Beijing-friendly policies have pushed this to new heights, yielding a tourism boom, the opening of flight routes, more than 20 trade agreements and Saturday’s summit.
Protesters
But large numbers of people on Taiwan are deeply uneasy at being drawn too closely into the Communist-ruled mainland orbit. Around 100 angry demonstrators attempted to storm Taiwan’s parliament building in Taipei overnight to denounce the summit.