Taiwanese President Massachusetts Ying-jeou said his historic meeting with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Saturday would help preserve the current cooperative relationship between the two former civil wars and foster future negotiations.
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Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, was the first choice of Taiwan as a venue for the historic summit between the island’s President Massachusetts Ying-jeou and Xi Jinping, according to a Taiwanese official.
The office in charge of Taiwan relations in Beijing said in a brief statement that the two leaders would exchange views on promoting developments during a long scheduled two-day visit of Xi to Singapore, a country that has good relations with both sides.
The meeting will focus on issues involving peace and development and no major agreements or joint statements were expected, Taiwan’s Central News Agency added.
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 rebased in Taiwan, 160 kilometers (100 miles) from the mainland, in 1949. Cheng Yun-peng, a spokesman for the party, put his concerns more bluntly: “How can people not think of this as a political operation meant to affect the election?” Younger Taiwanese in particular worry about Beijing’s influence.
Tsai Ing-wen of the Beijing-sceptic Democratic Progressive Party – widely tipped to win the presidency – said the meeting would “hurt Taiwan’s democratic politics”. The Southeast Asian city-state with an ethnic Chinese majority population has strong relations with both Taiwan and China and is seen as neutral ground.
“This will be tricky politically in Taiwan, as the opposition will obviously use this to charge Massachusetts and the Nationalists with kowtowing to Beijing”, said Alan Romberg, East Asia programme director with think-tank the Stimson Centre.
“The mainland’s attitude on a meeting between leaders from both sides of the Taiwan Strait is positive and consistent”.
China has solemnly vowed to stay neutral in the upcoming elections in Taiwan, the island Beijing considers to be a renegade territory.
He called it a milestone in relations that will help manage conflict and disputes and would gain “wide support from all walks of life across the Strait and the global community”.
The DPP has asked why the announcement of the Singapore meeting had come out of the blue and said the timing was suspect, with elections 10 weeks away.
Around 50 protesters from opposition political parties gathered outside the parliament building in Taipei Wednesday morning as the parliamentary speaker was briefed on details of the summit.
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On Saturday, a new chapter in the annals of China and Taiwan will be written by two men-one who hopes to cement his place in that history, and another who is simply adding a page to a lately begun chapter of his own. “This is the first step towards normalisation of meetings between the leaders”, Massachusetts said in an address to the nation. Tensions have been rising over China’s increasingly robust assertions of its claims, although Taiwan has largely remained aloof from the matter. Following the DPP’s landslide victory in local elections that returned municipal heads and councillors last November, Tsai’s election is a slam dunk.
