Former vice president Lien Chan’s (連戰) memoir showed his frustration that his long-term efforts to institutionalize peaceful relations between Taiwan and China have not yet borne fruit.
When former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was in office, Lien, also a member of the KMT, suggested that Ma should negotiate with Beijing on establishing a political framework to address thorny issues related to the future of cross-strait relations, said an excerpt from the memoir published on Tuesday.
Lien said he proposed the idea after returning from a visit to Shanghai in his capacity as honorary KMT chairman in late 2008, with Ma responding that political issues were fraught with difficulty, the excerpt says.
Photo provided by Commonwealth Publishing
During the trip, Lien said he met with then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and then-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Jia Qinglin (賈慶林), and concluded that both were men of sincerity.
Lien said he advised Ma to give some thought to the proposal, as Ma still had three years left as president, which largely overlapped with the terms in office of Hu and Jia, the memoir published by the Commonwealth Publishing Group says.
Ma told Lien that his administration would stick with three principles for handling cross-strait relations — to address “easy issues before difficult ones,” “urgent matters before non-urgent ones,” and “economic matters before political ones.”
Other than serving in various ministerial posts, Lien, 86, served as vice president under then-KMT president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) from 1996 to 2000, and KMT chairman from 2000 to 2005, after failed bids for the presidency in 2000 and 2004.
In 2005, Lien met Hu in Beijing in his capacity as then-opposition KMT chairman, the first formal talks between the highest leaders of the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party in 60 years since 1945 and the beginning of the Chinese civil war.
Lien also voiced suspicions that Ma was forced by the US government to shelve his idea to hold discussions with China on a cross-strait peace agreement.
Prior to Ma’s re-election campaign in 2012, he made a case for a cross-strait peace agreement during transit stops in the US on his way to visit the country’s diplomatic allies, which resulted in broad discussion.
However, Ma did not follow up with the idea throughout his two-term tenure that ended in May 2016, Lien said.
“I don’t know if [this was because he was] under pressure from the US,” Lien said.
Press releases issued by the Ma administration showed that in October 2011 Ma raised the idea of entering into a peace agreement with China at some point in the next decade.
However, Ma said he would only do so when three conditions were met: that such an agreement is what the country needs; that it has wide public support; and that it be subject to legislative oversight.
Lien appealed to Beijing to face up to the “political reality” that Taiwan has been governed by the Republic of China government since 1949, following the Chinese civil war, separate from the jurisdiction of China.
That political reality is the prerequisite for both sides to embark on political dialogue on issues such as ending hostility, political status and Taiwan’s international participation, because that is a page in history that “cannot be skipped,” Lien said in his memoir.
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