Mayor Ma gets invited to Shanghai

The Chinese Communist Party's top official in Shanghai yesterday invited Taipei's KMT mayor to visit China, in its latest bid to court Taiwan's opposition parties.

Shanghai party chief Huang Ju (黃菊) extended the invitation to Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in talks with KMT Vice Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄).

Both men were said to have stressed their opposition to independence for the 23 million people of Taiwan.

The meeting took place a day before Wu was expected to meet China's top envoy on Taiwan affairs, Wang Daohan (汪道涵).

There have also been talks circulating of a follow-up visit by KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰).

Wu told Huang that in his opinion Taiwan independence did not enjoy popular support.

"The mainstream popular sentiment in Taiwan is not for independence.

"And the mainstream popular sentiment will also not allow pro-independence advocates to get their own way," Wu told Huang at a meeting in Shanghai yesterday, in a comment that was clearly aimed at Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).

According to polls taken by Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, when the KMT was in office, the majority of people in Taiwan support what is called "maintaining the status quo."

This is taken to mean neither moving toward unification nor moving toward independence.

Wu said to Huang: "We are pursuing reunification and we hope to return to the 1992 agreement."

In 1992, China and Taiwan agreed that each side across the Strait could have its own interpretation of what "one China" meant without agreeing on a definition. The agreement -- albeit verbal -- enabled the two sides to hold talks in 1993.

But China's displeasure with former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) has long been a sticking point for China and a cause for at least two major breaks in talks over the past decade.

China broke off official contacts in July 1995, when Lee made a private trip to his alma mater in the US, a move Beijing labeled as separatist.

In 1999, when Lee called for political parity by referring to Taiwan's relations with China as "state-to-state" in nature, China once again shut off contacts with Taiwan.

However, Huang told Wu that the Taipei mayor was "welcome to visit at an appropriate time."

Shanghai's vice-mayor Feng Guoqin (馮國勤) is planning to visit Taiwan in early 2001, Huang added.

Shanghai and Taipei have discussed forging "brother city" ties. The brother city plan aims to skirt the sister city relations that cities in China have established with foreign countries.

China has refused to deal with Chen, demanding that he first embrace its "one China" principle.

Some in Chen's DPP reject the "one China" principle because they see it as tantamount to surrender to China.

Wu was in China for a meeting of Hakkas, a Chinese ethnic group on what was formally billed an unofficial visit.

But he met Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen (錢其琛) in Beijing on Thursday, marking the highest level of contact between the two parties since 1949.

On Saturday, Wu traveled to Nanjing, China's capital under the KMT, and visited a shrine to Sun Yat-sen, who is honored by both Beijing and Taipei as the founder of modern China.