China may try to win concessions on Taiwan’s sovereignty before President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) leaves office, a Washington conference has been told.
And that could lead to new tensions across the Taiwan Strait as the US continues its strategic rebalance to Asia this year.
Such tensions would in turn have a bearing on disputed territory issues in the South China Sea, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) senior adviser on China studies Christopher Johnson said.
He told the CSIS conference — Asia Pacific Forecast 2015 — that tensions could start to rise as the Taiwanese presidential election draws closer and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) looks strong.
Johnson said that the last time this happened, in the mid-1990s, Beijing decided to focus on Taiwan and put problems in the South China Sea on the back burner.
It will be interesting to see if China’s growing influence, strength and capability might lead it to manage both situations at the same time and not let up pressure in the South China Sea even as it puts more focus on cross-strait problems, he said.
Johnson said that if Ma’s approval ratings remain low as China assesses Taiwan’s presidential candidates, it might feel forced to act.
“They might feel a need to try to get something concrete out of him [Ma] on the core issue of sovereignty before he leaves office, because they don’t know what might come next,” Johnson said.
However, he said that Ma may not be accommodating and that, in and of itself, could “spark some difficulties.”
Johnson said that he did not think Beijing would wait until three weeks before the presidential election before making challenges.
However, he said he was confident that Beijing would not blatantly start finger-pointing or insisting that the election “go one way or the other.”
Greater tension could stem from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) view that the “Taiwan issue” cannot be passed down from one generation to the next.
Johnson said it was “very telling” that Xi had made this statement.
CSIS senior adviser for Asia Bonnie Glaser said that she had called on Taiwan to clarify its position on what was originally called the “11-dash line.”
She said it was created by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) when it was in power in China and that Taiwan and all of the other claimants to land features in the South China Sea should bring their claims in line with the Law of the Sea and identify their claims.
“Taiwan has an interest in demonstrating that it is a responsible player and therefore should clarify what its claim is and bring it into line with the Law of the Sea and encourage all the other claimants to do that as well,” Glaser said.
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