Chance for cross-strait progress grows

The pacifist-sounding rhetoric, though not without challenge, is gaining ground in the competition of ideas in China, the senior China policymaker said.

US role

A keen desire by China to curry favor with the US also helps elicit amenable behavior from the country of 1.2 billion people.

"Eager to integrate into the world, Beijing has a significant interest in being seen to promote regional stability and prosperity in cross-strait relations," said Gerrit Gong, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

He noted that after Sept. 11, Washington is looking at the world in terms of "if you're not with us, you're against us." Not surprisingly, Beijing wants to be seen as seeking mutually beneficial avenues of cooperation with the US, Gong said, adding that establishing a positive atmosphere with Taipei will serve to solidify that policy.

Finally, Jiang's planned retirement in March 2003 provides incentives for his would-be successors to treat Taiwan gently.

Aides close to the Chinese president are dying to score points for their boss so he may be remembered as a great statesman in Chinese history, a Chinese official was quoted as saying.

"Setting in motion, not necessarily resolving cross-strait relations, is definitely a plus for Jiang and his followers, since the successful bid to host the 2008 Olympic Games is widely considered inadequate," a political scientist from National Sun Yat-sen University said.

He noted that the economic take-off and the return of Hong Kong and Macao to Chinese rule are generally accredited to the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平).

The mainland affairs official said that he saw a small window of opportunity for resumption of cross-strait dialogue early next year and that when the two sides mean to talk, no face-saving measure -- such as "one China" -- is needed.

Hot and cold

Beijing suspended talks in June 1995 after former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) visited his alma mater Cornell University in the US.

But in February 1998, China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait sent its Taiwanese counterpart, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), a letter saying without preconditions: "Let's resume exchanges, let's prepare for talks, and let's prepare for the Koo-Wang meetings."

In October of that year, SEF Chairman Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫) made a high-profile, ice-breaking trip across the Strait. His Chinese counterpart Wang had promised to visit Taiwan the following year but cancelled the journey after Lee defined cross-strait relations as special state-to-state in nature.

"If Beijing fails to grab the chance next spring, no dialogue may take place before the Chinese Communist Party finishes its leadership shuffle in 2003 or even later," the official said.