China’s unification plan finds few takers

Promised rewards unlikely to sway Taiwan into rejoining the fold

BEIJING— Chinese President Xi Jinping declared Wednesday that he wants progress on China’s decades-long quest to win control of Taiwan. But his proposal appeared unlikely to win over residents of the self-ruled island, who have seen Hong Kong’s freedoms in rapid retreat under a similar deal.

Xi stressed how vital unification with Taiwan is to his vision of Chinese national rejuvenation in his first major speech about the disputed island. The Chinese Communist Party regards Taiwan, a lively democracy, as a historical mistake — a piece of territory that should never have gained autonomy from China. And as an ardent patriot, Xi finds Taiwan’s separate status especially galling.

Xi did not lay down a timetable for absorbing Taiwan, which is something more hawkish voices in Beijing have urged. But as he nears his seventh year as president, he indicated that his patience had limits and that he wanted to bring Taiwan into ever closer political, economic and cultural orbit around China.

“That the two sides of the strait are still not fully unified is a wound to the Chinese nation left by history,” Xi said in his direction-setting speech. The political divisions between China and Taiwan, he added “cannot be passed on from generation to generation.”

But even laced with this sense of urgency, Xi’s recipe for bringing Taiwan closer to absorption into “one China” appeared unlikely to win over many on the island, even after its president, Tsai Ing-wen — openly loathed by Beijing — suffered bruising electoral losses in November.

On the one hand, Xi threatened military force if Taiwanese leaders grasped for independence. On the other hand, Xi said that if Taiwan were to agree to unification, its rights would be ensured by the “one country, two systems” framework that Beijing used in Hong Kong after it returned from British colonial control in 1997.

But neither the threat nor the promised reward seemed likely to sharply weaken Taiwanese opposition to China’s demands, said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor of political science at the Hong Kong Baptist University.