Five years ago tomorrow, China's President Jiang Zemin (
Four months after the speech, cross-strait relations were appearing to flourish as both sides were making final arrangements for a second Koo-Wang meeting. But then President Lee Teng-hui (
On this side of the Strait, we were told yesterday by Lin Chong-pin (
But Lin's remarks strike us as somewhat disingenuous. Much has changed on Taiwan's part. For a start -- and this is also to a very real degree a result of the missile crisis of 1995-6 -- the overwhelming sentiment in Taiwan is against any kind of reunification under any formula in anybody's lifetime. For evidence, look no further than President Lee Teng-hui's (
This reality should not be difficult to grasp. Any long-term resident in Taiwan can see how the lifting of martial law in the late 1980s led to a more open society and Taiwanese began to ask themselves who they were and what this meant. The government itself contributed to the process in the latter half of the decade with its slow acceptance of responsibility for the 228 Massacre and the White Terror period.
Indeed, while China has refused to talk to Taiwan for half a decade, the Taiwanese have been working out what being Taiwanese means, replacing the symbols and history imposed on them by the KMT in its colonial era with symbols and history that mean something to them. The adoption of Feb. 28 as a national holiday is probably the most poignant symbol of Taiwan's emergence from what President Lee himself has referred to as the "sadness of being Taiwanese." In this sense, Taiwan has changed greatly and what it wants has changed too.
Jiang's eight points make interesting reading now only because they seem so outdated. They belong to an era when the fiction of "eventual reunification" as a common goal of both sides could be taken seriously. Today Jiang's words read like a long-dead letter, not something that can possibly have any relevance to the here and now. In China, the same might be said but with a different emphasis. As China's Vice Premier Qian Qichen (
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Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.