Foes China, Taiwan near first summit
BEIJING — When the presidents of China and Taiwan meet this weekend for the first time since the Chinese revolution ended in 1 949, the once-bitter Cold War foes will test years of warming ties.
The meeting, which was announced Wednesday, marks a watershed in relations between Beijing and Taipei, whose enmity had
once been feared as a possible flash point for another world war.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Taiwanese counterpart, Ma Ying-jeou, will meet on neutral ground in Singapore, the Asian citystate whose government maintains friendly ties with both. The talks would be the first between the leaders since Taiwan split from mainland China at the end of the civil war.
Saturday’s meeting could be the last chance for Xi to press China’s case for closer economic and political ties before Taiwan’s January elections for the presidency and legislature. Ma’s Nationalist Party is lagging in polls.
A win for the opposition could see a significant curtailing of Ma’s pro-China initiatives, something Beijing would be loath to witness.
“This will be tricky politically in Taiwan, as the opposition will obviously use this to charge Ma and the Nationalists with kowtowing to Beijing,” said Alan Romberg, East Asia program director with Washington think tank the Stimson Center.
Ma, who steps down as Taiwan’s president next year, has made improving relations with China one of his top policies with the signing of investment and tourism deals. But the expected economic benefits from his pro-China stance have largely failed to arrive, experts said, with wages and growth stagnant in Taiwan.
Yet Saturday’s meeting could boost the Nationalists’ credentials for driving progress
in relations with China and heading off past threats and hostility from Beijing that rattled many Taiwanese, observers say. It also may help that the meeting puts Ma, the leader of 23 million people, on equal footing with the leader of the world’s most populous country and its second-largest economy.
“Ma and presumably the rest of the Nationalists will cast this as demonstrating the benefits of adhering to the 1992 Consensus as a constructive basis for handling cross-strait relations — indeed as the indispensable basis,” Romberg said.
The 1992 Consensus refers to an agreement that formed the basis of talks between the two sides, under which both consider Taiwan and the mainland to be one country with separate interpretations according to their own constitutions.
The main pro-independence opposition Democratic Progressive Party has refused to recognize the consensus, calling it meaningless and unrepresentative of popular sentiment on the island.
But the meeting could backfire.
“The reception here hasn’t been positive at all,” said J. Michael Cole, a Taipei-based senior fellow with the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute.
Cole said the meeting appeared to have been initiated by Beijing and was already seen by many people in Taiwan as an “eleventh-hour attempt to shake things up a bit” ahead of the elections.
Most of the frustration, Cole said, was directed at Ma, with anger surfacing on social media and on Taipei’s regular evening talk shows. Formal
talks came after Ma, president since 2008, set aside old hostilities to allow lower-level official meetings. Taiwan and China, its top trading partner, have signed 23 deals covering mainly trade, transit and investment.
Any concessions Ma extracts from China could help Nationalist presidential candidate Eric Chu in the polls, said Hong Kong Chinese politics expert Willy Lam. Xi, for his part, also hopes a friendly, nonthreatening meeting gives the Nationalists a boost, while showing mainland Chinese that he could be the best bet in decades for achieving unification.
Presidents of the two sides have not met since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war to Mao Zedong’s communists and the Nationalists took their base to Taiwan, 100 miles from the mainland, in 1949. The two sides have been separately ruled since then, with Taiwan evolving into a democracy.
Zhang Zhijun, director of the Chinese Cabinet’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said in a statement that Xi and Ma would meet in their capacity as “leaders of the two sides” of the Taiwan Strait and would address each other not as “president” but as “mister.”
The formulation reflects China’s insistence that Taiwan and the mainland are part of a single Chinese nation, but it also affords both leaders equal status, possibly an attempt to blunt criticism in Taiwan that Ma is pandering to China. The two leaders
will have dinner after their meeting but will not sign any agreements or hold a joint news conference, officials said.
In a statement, the Democratic Progressive Party criticized Ma for planning the meeting in secret and said it appeared to be intended to influence elections.
“This once again shows the Ma government’s tendency to do things in a black box, violate democracy and evade oversight, and the public will have difficulty accepting this,” the statement read.
Ma is stepping down as president next year after his maximum two terms, and Democratic Progressive Party candidate Tsai Ing-wen is considered the front-runner to replace him.
Beijing has hoped that economic inducements would lead to greater acceptance among Taiwanese of eventual political reunification. A Democratic Progressive Party victory could prompt Beijing to reassess its policies and become more forward in pressuring Taiwan into a political union.
Ma’s government has come under increasing criticism at home for cozying up to China, as fears rose that Beijing will leverage economic relations to exert more power over the island.
Such sentiments helped the Democratic Progressive Party to a landslide victory a year ago in local elections, raising the possibility it might win not only the presidency but also a majority in legislative elections Jan. 16. The
Nationalists replaced their presidential candidate Oct. 17, highlighting their disarray.
Given the chances of a Nationalist defeat, China is likely to proceed cautiously to avoid further alienating Taiwanese voters.
Xi warned Taiwan in 2013 against putting off political differences from generation to generation. China has long advocated a Hong Kong-style one-country, two-system form of joint rule, in which Beijing controls Taiwan but the island of 23 million retains control of its political, legal and economic affairs.
Pro-independence demonstrators rallied outside the legislature in Taipei to protest the planned meeting. One banner urged Ma, “Don’t come back if you go.”
“We will resolutely oppose this,” demonstrator Hung Te-jen said. “Ma is sneaking around to sell off Taiwan.”
In China, Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University, called Saturday’s meeting a “historic event” but regretted that it did not take place earlier.
“If it had happened two years ago, it is possible it would have led to substantial achievements,” he said.”It could have created a large economic effect across the strait. The two sides could have found a starting point to maintain cross-strait peace.”
But with Ma stepping down soon, he added, “there won’t be any substantial and immediate influence from the meeting.”
Before his meeting with Ma, China’s Xi will visit Vietnam today, the first trip by a Chinese president there in a decade.
Xi will emphasize growing
economic bonds between the neighbors, with China accounting for one-fifth of Vietnam’s trade last year, up from 12 percent in 2005.
“Xi wants to show Vietnam that its relationship with China is more important than that of any other country, especially the U.S.,” said Nguyen Manh Hung, professor emeritus at George Mason University in Virginia. “He wants to show Vietnam, you need me and you don’t want to make me angry. The Vietnamese can’t totally ignore Chinese pressure.”
But he’ll face a public wary of China’s growing influence and its assertiveness in the South China Sea that’s exacerbating a decades-long spat over territory, fishing grounds and drilling rights. Only 19 percent of Vietnamese hold favorable views on China, a Pew Research Center poll shows.
“They bully us at sea and want to take our islands,” university student Tran Hoang Nam, 21, said Monday, while strolling past the granite monument to Vietnam’s patriarch. “They sell us fake products and toxic food. So, we have to be very cautious when dealing with this socalled good friend.”