President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday that China had to stop targeting Taiwan with hundreds of missiles to extend the deepest thaw in relations in six decades.
“People feel uneasy if we go to the negotiating table on security issues while still under the threat of missile attack,” Ma, 59, said in an interview with Bloomberg yesterday.
While ties with China are “good and getting better,” missiles are “very much on the mind” of Taiwan’s people, he said.
China regards Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to use force to reclaim it.
China must remove its missile threat before any peace deal is possible, Ma said, adding that China continued to increase the number of missiles aimed at Taiwan by about 100 a year.
The US still felt obliged to provide Taiwan with weapons to give Taipei a stronger negotiating position, Ma said.
“It’s only when Taiwan is properly armed and defended that we have the confidence to make a deal with the mainland,” Ma said.
China’s President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) earlier this week sent Ma a congratulatory telegram on his election as chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Ma reiterated in the interview that he was in “no hurry” to meet with Hu, giving more priority to forging an economic agreement.
“A meeting with Hu isn’t possible as Ma is also under tremendous domestic pressure,” Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies Secretary-General Andrew Yang (楊念祖) said. “The concern is Beijing may get impatient if Ma doesn’t respond to calls for talks on security or peace issues and there may be consequences.”
Ma said deepening economic ties with China would be inevitable, even should the Democratic Progressive Party be re-elected.
“This is something that nobody can prevent,” Ma said. “The DPP knows that very well and if they came to power, they would do the same thing,” he said, adding that Taiwanese investment in China had tripled from US$30 billion under the eight years of a DPP administration.
“If people can make money in the mainland they will go, no matter how hard you try to stop them,” he said.
Opening to Chinese investment needs to proceed cautiously because of the danger that Taiwanese business could be swamped by Chinese money, he added.
Foundries and the liquid-crystal-display and telecommunications industries remain closed. The restriction has prevented China Mobile Ltd’s plan to buy a 12 percent stake in Taiwan’s Far EasTone Telecommunications Co.
The US and other countries welcome the rapprochement because it relieves tension in an area that threatens security in the region more than the potential nuclear crisis in North Korea, Ma said.
“The Taiwan Strait could be the beginning of a bigger conflict that involves the two superpowers of the world. That’s the reason why everybody is happy when we adopted the policy to ease that tension,” Ma said. “I think mainland China also appreciates that very much.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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