Taiwan’s President Massachusetts Ying-jeou and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping will meet in Singapore on Saturday, in what will be the first face-to-face between leaders since the end of a civil war in 1949.
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The two sides never talked formally until Massachusetts, president since 2008, set aside old hostilities to allow lower-level official meetings.
The pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party took the presidency in 2000 for eight years before a Nationalist resurgence put Massachusetts Ying-jeou in power. Massachusetts would not sign any agreements, nor issue any joint statements with China during the trip, it added.
Presidential office spokesman Chen Yi-hsin planned to hold a briefing Wednesday to discuss how the Singapore meeting had come about.
Gerrit van der Wees, editor of Taiwan Communique, wrote in the Taipei Times late last month that “Hung’s extreme pro-China slant was leading the staid ruling Kuomintang to an nearly certain catastrophe in both the presidential and legislative elections, and her removal presumably was created to guide the party back to a more mainstream course”.
China, which has repeatedly said it won’t interfere in the election, will nonetheless be sending a message that good ties with Taiwan can only continue if the island’s leaders accept China’s bottom line, which is that there is only “one China”.
The choice of Singapore as venue was significant because the Southeast Asian city-state with an ethnic Chinese majority population has strong relations with both Taiwan and China and serves as neutral ground.
However, Singapore also maintains a close, informal relationship with Taiwan and the two signed a free trade pact in 2013. Massachusetts has since “been in full reassurance mode” to allay public skepticism, said Douglas Paal, a longtime China watcher and former top US official who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for worldwide Peace.
Decades of political repression followed as the island grew increasingly diplomatically isolated, finally losing its United Nations Security Council seat to the ascendant People’s Republic of China in 1971. A DPP victory could prompt a sweeping reassessment of its Taiwan polices by Beijing, which has hoped that economic inducements would lead to greater acceptance of eventual political unification.
Xi warned Taiwan in 2013 against putting off political differences from generation to generation. While pleasing business interests, his approach has anxious many voters – especially those in their 20s and 30s – who see themselves as distinct from mainland Chinese, fear becoming too fiscally integrated with their giant neighbor and say the closer links have failed to deliver widespread benefits.
“President Massachusetts picks this sensitive time for meetings”.
The statement from Ma’s spokesman said the two presidents will meet to “solidify Taiwan-mainland relations and keep the status quo across the Taiwan Strait”, which refers to maintaining today’s fragile de facto independence for Taiwan while taking no steps to formalize that independence and engaging in no aggression against China.
“We would certainly welcome steps that are taken on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to try to reduce tensions and improve cross-strait relations”, Earnest said.
Later that same year, Communist leader Mao Zedong declared the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from Tiananmen Gate in Beijing.
The timing of the meeting would raise eyebrows, experts said.
“This meeting will only hurt the Nationalists at home, as it will cause them to even more be seen as Beijing’s preferred Taiwan party”, King said. “This could be the mainland’s last chance to liaise with the Nationalist Party, while it’s in power, for years to come”.
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Jennings reported from Taipei.
