Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) should seek legislative approval before agreeing to any meeting with China’s leaders, New Power Party (NPP) Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said yesterday.
“If President Tsai in the future wants to meet with leaders of the People’s Republic of China, our expectation is that she has to report on the purpose and content of the trip and get approval from the legislature and the public before going,” Huang said.
“Prior to the [President] Ma [Ying-jeou (馬英九)]-[Chinese President] Xi [Jinping (習近平)] meeting, we already made our position very clear: We do not oppose a meeting between leaders on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, but there has to be civic supervision before any meeting takes place,” Huang said.
The Ma-Xi meeting took place in November last year in Singapore.
He slammed reports that Ma had agreed to meet with Xi after Beijing sent him a message saying the meeting was an “opportunity which might never come again.”
Huang said that any decision to hold such a high-level meeting should be based on what would be discussed and how it would benefit Taiwan, rather than on “cryptic remarks” by Beijing.
“The Ma-Xi meeting might have been useful to [Beijing] because they caused President Ma to make a fool of himself by going to Singapore to accept the ‘one China’ principle, but it had a huge negative impact on Taiwan’s international status,” he said.
He said that the NPP would look closely at the reason for any proposed meeting before giving its support, citing discussion of a schedule for removing missiles targeting Taiwan, revisions to China’s “Anti-Secession” Law (反分裂國家法) or other “concrete” goodwill measures as reasons that would win the party’s approval for a meeting.
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