Minister of the Interior Yeh Jiunn-rong’s (葉俊榮) visit to Itu Aba Island (Taiping Island, 太平島) on Tuesday has sparked a frenzied discussion about its significance.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) claimed it was a move by President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration to salvage its plunging approval ratings.
While Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) said Yeh’s trip was not aimed at “paving the way” for a presidential visit, he added that the office does not rule out such a visit by Tsai.
There have also been media reports alleging that Yeh was actually a “stand-in,” meaning that he went in Tsai’s stead, and that Tsai had initially hoped to go herself.
Tsai might have wanted to go; either way, that was not the point. The point was that the message of her having the intention to go (true or not) — and she did send a Cabinet minister over — has been spread.
The KMT said the visit came “too late” to win the public’s support, referring to Tsai’s approval ratings. However, a closer look at information provided by the group that conducted the latest poll shows that after three months in office, former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) — who took office in 2008 with a record-high number of votes — had a higher disapproval rating than Tsai and a relatively lower approval rating.
Poll numbers can be alarming, but they are hardly a cause for any prompt or rash response. Yeh’s trip to the island, as he said, was in line with the five proposals the president put forward last month for Itu Aba, including turning it into a humanitarian service center and carrying out international scientific research on ecology, geology, seismology and meteorology.
According to a Central News Agency report, Yeh said that an automated weather station and a tidal observatory are expected to be completed next month and that the ministry is considering sharing information obtained from the satellite tracking station with other nations to promote international cooperation.
Calling for global cooperation is a friendly gesture to neighboring rival claimants in the South China Sea and suits the administration’s “new southbound policy.”
Moreover, by visiting Itu Aba and intimating that Tsai might be willing to visit it, the government has, to some extent, demonstrated its goodwill toward Beijing, as securing Taiwan’s claim over the island has been a rare common ground between Tsai’s administration and the Chinese government.
In the set of guidelines for the “new southbound policy” that the Presidential Office made public on Tuesday, a section on regional peace and development underlines the importance of cross-strait cooperation.
“[The administration] does not rule out the possibility that at an appropriate time in the future, negotiations and conversations on related issues and possible cooperation with [China] would be undertaken,” it said.
That was clearly intended as an implicit retort to suspicions that the “new southbound policy” was based on the idea of confronting China.
As Cambodia-born KMT Legislator Lin Li-chan (林麗嬋) said, the government’s policy might be compromised if Southeast Asian countries believe that working with Taiwan would damage their relations with China.
While Cambodia might be a less than convincing example — considering it is a close ally of China — and keeping in mind that there is room for Taiwan to gain from Beijing’s strained relationships with some Southeast Asian countries, insofar as regional peace is what the Tsai administration upholds, improving the relationship with China is a difficult, but must-do task.
The olive branch has been extended. Communication requires both parties’ goodwill rather than a forced-upon and manufactured consensus.
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