President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) definition of cross-strait ties as “special” reflects his long-standing pragmatic approach toward China that aims to avoid confrontation with Beijing on the sovereignty issue, a US expert in cross-strait affairs said on Thursday.
“Ma is walking a fine line between not accepting the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China’s] definition of the relationship as ‘domestic’ on the one hand, and not insisting that cross-strait ties be treated as ‘international’ on the other,” said Alan Romberg, senior associate and director of East Asian Studies at the Washington-based Henry L. Stimson Center.
Romberg was commenting on a statement made by Ma during a recent interview with the leading Mexican daily El Sol de Mexico, in which he defined ties between Taiwan and China as “special relations” and not “between two states.”
Romberg said that Ma pointed out he is the democratically elected head of government of a sovereign state, but also spoke of the respective “authorities” on each side of the Strait because he knew there was no constructive purpose in insisting that Beijing deals with Taipei as a sovereign government and that forcing the issue would lead to confrontation.
Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) seems willing to take a parallel approach, while making no compromise in terms of the PRC’s “one China principle,” Romberg said.
“The whole ‘art’ of Ma’s policy and indeed of Hu Jintao’s is to yield nothing in principle but to try to avoid counterproductively pushing one’s own position on the other side,” he said.
Such an approach is seen in the use of the general characterization the so-called “1992 consensus” by the two sides in handling the question of the term “one China,” so that they can avoid confronting the differences of definition, he said.
However, with Ma having repeatedly emphasized the connection between Taiwan’s “international space” and the quality of cross-strait relations, an important test of the success of this approach will come on the “international space” issue, Romberg said.
If China seeks to limit Taiwan’s international participation simply because it does not want to allow Taipei to have “too much access” to international organizations in any form, progress in cross-strait ties will inevitably slow down, he said.
However, if China is only trying to test whether Taiwan really challenges Beijing on the issue of sovereignty, the opportunity for greater international participation for Taiwan will open up, given the Ma administration’s willingness to avoid such challenges, he said.
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