A great deal of water has flowed through the Taiwan Strait in the 70 years since Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Mao Zedong (毛澤東) were in office. So the meeting in Singapore between their heirs, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), could legitimately be described as historic.
The diplomatic negotiations that preceded the meeting was exquisitely complex, even covering who should pay for dinner — they split the bill. However, after a brief exchange of views behind closed doors, no joint statement was issued and only a heavily sanitized account of the meeting was made available to China’s state media.
So why did the meeting happen, and what does it portend?
Ever since Mao’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) won the Chinese Civil War — which the last meeting between the parties, in 1945, had been called to try to avert — and Chiang’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) forces withdrew to Taiwan, relations between the two sides have smoldered without ever really catching fire. While there was no love lost between the US and the KMT leadership, the US gave Taiwan assurances of military protection, which deterred China from trying to unify Taiwan by force.
Mao’s adventures on the Korean Peninsula, supporting North Korea against South Korea and its Western allies, helped to cement the Washington-Taipei axis, which, thanks to some nifty diplomatic footwork, survived then-US president Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China in the early 1970s. The US recognized the CCP as China’s legitimate government, while helping to sustain Taiwan in a limbo between sovereignty and the practical exercise of statehood.
For China’s rulers, Taiwan was a “renegade province,” and it steadily picked off members of the international community who tried to treat it as anything more than this. However, there has also been a recognition of reality — especially economic reality — along the way.
People remember 1989 for the Tiananmen Square Massacre. However in May and June of that year, ministers like myself flew to Beijing for what seemed to us all to be a positive and truly historic occasion. China allowed Taiwan to attend the Asian Development Bank’s annual board meeting for the first time, provided it was called “Taipei, China.”
Money talks for Taiwan and China, and their economies are now closely linked, with large numbers of Taiwanese living and working in China — especially in the Shanghai area — and huge Taiwanese investments in Chinese manufacturing.
However, though Taiwanese politics is dominated by its relationship with China, the reality of deep commercial ties between the two nations has had no diplomatic equivalent. The KMT wants to improve relations without surrendering Taiwan’s independence. The Democratic Progressive Party wants to strike a more autonomous posture.
A survey three years ago suggested that 80 percent of Taiwanese would support a formal declaration of independence, provided that it did not prompt a Chinese invasion. That is a rather large caveat. China regularly warns Taiwan against any such reckless action, and the US puts the squeeze on Taiwan’s leaders whenever they seem to be getting too uppity with China.
There appear to be two reasons Xi and Ma met. First, they are clearly worried about the KMT, which lost last year’s local elections in a landslide, losing the elections on Jan. 16 as well. Both hope that showing that the two sides can get along without too much trouble would bring electoral benefits for the KMT.
In addition, at a time when the Chinese economy is slowing and regional tensions are rising because of China’s muscle flexing in the South China and East China seas, Xi seems eager to radiate peace-loving ambitions. Having unsettled many of his neighbors, not just the US, his visit to Vietnam and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s (李克強) visit to South Korea, are of a piece with his dinner-hour diplomacy with Ma.
China’s real, long-term intentions are not entirely obvious, and maybe that is part of its strategy: ambiguous signals play an important role in diplomacy.
Two things are clear.
First, Xi’s initiative shows the extent to which he dominates Chinese politics. A weaker leader could not have taken such a step.
Second, peaceful reunification remains unlikely, unless it takes place — as China continues to promise — on the basis of “one country, two systems.”
However, Taiwanese are unlikely to be reassured by what they see happening in Hong Kong, which was promised the same thing before its return to China in 1997.
Taiwan’s system is democratic; China’s is not. What the example of Hong Kong suggests is that China would have to force Taiwan to give up democracy and the rule of law — or embrace both itself.
Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner for external affairs, is chancellor of the University of Oxford
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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