The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has said it is unable to accept a Chinese official’s request that the party give up its pro-independence stance.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Yang Yi (楊毅) told Xinhua news agency yesterday: “We hope the DPP can truly realize that there is a dead-end road if it does not give up the stance of ‘Taiwanese independence.’”
The comments came after DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said earlier that the DPP would not rule out engaging in direct dialogue with China, as long as there were no preconditions.
DPP spokesperson Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) told reporters that the Chinese response was regrettable and that it failed to respect Taiwan’s democratic society.
“We had hoped that the Chinese government would have taken the opportunity to understand Taiwan and its people, instead of just the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT],” he said.
The DPP boss has said in recent interviews that she would be willing to open talks with China and that future cross-strait relations would be more “stable and consistent.”
Analysts have said the move shows the DPP is willing to prove it can manage cross-strait relations ahead of the 2012 presidential election.
However, Tsai Ing-wen has emphasized the need for China to drop any preconditions to talks.
Tsai Chi-chang said that as long as China demands the DPP abandon independence, talks between the DPP and China, which have been stalled since former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) administration, wouldn’t be able to move forward.
“Our position is very clear; the DPP cannot accept any political preconditions from China,” Tsai Chi-chang said. “At the same time, we have to ask, has the government already accepted these Chinese preconditions as the basis for cross-strait talks?”
Yang also said: “Opposition against Taiwanese independence and an insistence on the ‘1992 consensus’ are the political grounds for the betterment and development of cross-strait relations.”
The “1992 consensus” refers to a supposed agreement that was said to spell out that both Taiwan and China agreed to a “one China” principle, but with different interpretations. The KMT’s Su Chi (蘇起) admitted in 2006 that he had made the term up in 2000.
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