Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) on Sunday urged China to have the confidence to engage in exchanges with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) instead of looking at the party through the eyes of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Cross-strait peace is a policy goal of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) government — the same as all previous governments under former presidents Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) — Lai said in a speech celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Chinese-language magazine The Journalist.
“China should understand the DPP’s culture and thinking, but not through the KMT,” he said. “If China does not change its mindset, it would never get a real understanding of the DPP — and that is the problem now.”
Photo: Huang Yao-cheng, Taipei Times
Regarding China’s insistence that the DPP accept the so-called “1992 consensus” before it would talk with the Tsai government, Lai said it was neither necessary for China nor fair to the DPP.
The “1992 consensus” — a term former Mainland Affairs Council chairman Su Chi (蘇起) admitted making up in 2000 — refers to a tacit understanding between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party that both sides acknowledge there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “China” means.
“The reality is that it is not Taiwan that wants to unify with China; it is also not Taiwan that wants to change the ‘status quo’ across the strait. The days have passed when Taiwan wanted to ‘recover the mainland.’ It is China that wants to change the ‘status quo,’ because it wants to unify with Taiwan,” Lai said.
“If a big company wants to merge with a smaller one, it will make an offer. Now China wants Taiwan to make an offer. If Taiwan’s offer is not acceptable to China, China says it will not have exchanges with Taiwan. China even threatens to use force to annex Taiwan. This is not right; neither is it fair to Taiwan,” Lai said.
China’s attitude aside, Lai said it was important for Taiwanese to reach a consensus.
“If Taiwanese view on China is divided, no peace can be maintained across the strait,” he said.
Lai’s second term as mayor of Tainan is due to end next year, and some people are waiting to see what he will do next.
On Sunday, he said that Tsai had invited him to serve as Presidential Office secretary-general, an offer he said he declined because his city needed him to finish rebuilding projects undertaken after a devastating earthquake and to complete an underground railway project.
There has been speculation that he will run for New Taipei mayor in 2018, but Lai said the DPP should first consider nominating “local politicians” for the job.
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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