President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on Monday said she would consider meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) if it were to be on an equal footing.
This was not the first time Tsai expressed a willingness to meet Xi, nor did it represent a change in her stance on cross-strait relations, but this time, the statement was made with the strength of her re-election.
Since taking office, Tsai has always been open to exchanges with China as long as it respected Taiwan’s democracy and sovereignty. Beijing is unlikely to extend an invitation to Tsai, but a meeting need not ever take place. As long as she maintains this openness, she is telling Beijing: “The ball is in your court.” If China continues to act with aggression toward Taiwan, it will have no way to justify it to the international community.
China has been antagonistic toward Tsai and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), primarily because Tsai has rejected the so-called “1992 consensus” that there is only “one China,” which the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party have insisted on as the basis for cross-strait ties.
In October 2017, Tsai said in an interview that a new model for cross-strait relations was needed. At the time, then-premier William Lai (賴清德) drew media attention for his statement about Taiwanese independence, but two weeks later he also called for a new cross-strait development plan, showing that he and Tsai were on the same page. Lai also said that Taiwan would interact with China on the principles of equality and mutual respect during the APEC summit the following month.
In September that year, Lai had also said that Taiwan was a sovereign nation whose official title is the Republic of China, and that “the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are independent of each other.”
On Jan. 16, Tsai said: “We don’t have a need to declare ourselves an independent state. We are an independent country already and we call ourselves the Republic of China, Taiwan.”
During her New Year’s speech last month, Tsai reiterated her openness to cross-strait exchanges, and introduced her “four musts,” calling on China to respect the will of the nation’s people and to resolve cross-strait issues peacefully. On Monday, she again raised these points and said that China must abandon threats of force against Taiwan.
“The election results showed that people in Taiwan said loudly they cannot accept China’s ‘one country, two systems’ formula, because Taiwan is a free and democratic society and each person is used to this lifestyle,” she said.
In response, China said it insisted on the “1992 consensus,” essentially ignoring Tsai’s calls for mutual respect, and ignoring the will of the Taiwanese majority as expressed through Tsai’s re-election. However, China’s obstinacy will only serve to further alienate Taiwanese, and could help Taiwan garner more support in the international community, where it could argue that Beijing is ignoring it despite its willingness to talk.
The Tsai administration and the DPP should increase their offers of cooperation with Beijing on a variety of exchange opportunities, while simultaneously engaging the rest of the international community. Tsai must be vocal that she and her party represent the will of Taiwan’s 23 million people, and if Beijing wants to engage, it must do so through Tsai and the DPP.
Now that Taiwanese have made it clear that they do not support compromises on the nation’s sovereignty, China must decide if it wants to continue wasting time with empty, tired rhetoric that nobody takes seriously, or finally wake up to reality and engage Taiwan with respect.
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