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Historic Ma-Xi meeting limits DPP’s options

TAIPEI — Flashback to March 2000: Taiwan appeared set to elect an opposition leader as President and upset its relationship with Beijing. Then-Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji issued a finger-wagging ultimatum: “Do not just act on impulse at this juncture, which will decide the future course that China and Taiwan will follow. Otherwise, I’m afraid you won’t get another opportunity to regret.”

TAIPEI — Flashback to March 2000: Taiwan appeared set to elect an opposition leader as President and upset its relationship with Beijing. Then-Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji issued a finger-wagging ultimatum: “Do not just act on impulse at this juncture, which will decide the future course that China and Taiwan will follow. Otherwise, I’m afraid you won’t get another opportunity to regret.”

Taiwan responded days later by handing Mr Chen Shui-bian — candidate for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) — a decisive win and throwing an eight-year chill over ties between the former civil war foes.

Current Chinese President Xi Jinping is trying a more nuanced approach. In his meeting on Saturday with outgoing Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, Mr Xi put the relationship in clear terms: Stick together, and prosper. Shake things up, and sink the peace. In other words, Taiwan would face the same choice, whether or not the current frontrunner, DPP chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen, wins the presidency in January.

“The warning is not intended to change the election outcome, but to influence the landscape of public opinion post-election, so as to provide a stronger incentive for Tsai to avoid disrupting the cross-strait status quo,” said Mr Andrew Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia University. “This is a message intended to narrow the DPP’s manoeuvring space, in the sense that they would not dare to pull another Chen Shui-bian set of initiatives.”

Communist Party leaders in Beijing are seeing the same public opinion polls that have for months shown Ms Tsai with a wide lead over Mr Ma’s Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalist Party, in the Jan 16 vote. She leads KMT Chairman Eric Chu by 43 per cent to 27 per cent, according to a TVBS survey conducted on Sunday.

The 80-second handshake between Mr Xi and Mr Ma was the first encounter between top leaders from the two sides since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled across the Taiwan Strait in 1949.

“The Ma-Xi summit won’t be a game-changer for Taiwan’s election,” said Mr Alexander Huang, a professor at Tamkang University’s Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies in Taipei. “The campaign will soon be over, and the government may change, but cross-strait relations will continue.”

However, it does ensure the China issue stays at the centre of the debate for the last weeks of the campaign. Just over one-quarter of Taiwanese favour eventually achieving independence, according to a government survey in July, while about 10 per cent support reunification.

Most Taiwanese — about 57 per cent — want to preserve the current state of affairs. For more than two decades this has been based on the so-called one-China principle and the “1992 consensus”, whereby both sides have agreed they are part of China, even if they disagree on what that means. “Of course we were part of that country, but now, after so many years, we have a different way of life,” Mr Chen Zheng-yi, 75, who volunteers for a Buddhist organisation, said in Taipei on Monday. “All we want is for there to be peace and the chance to do business with each other ... and we are not at war.”

While her party officially supports independence, Ms Tsai has vowed to uphold the “status quo” with Beijing and has not ruled out meeting Mr Xi, provided there are no preconditions.

“Dr Tsai will champion the peaceful and stable development of cross-strait relations in accordance with the will of the Taiwanese people and the existing ROC (Republic of China) constitutional order,” Mr Chao Tien-Lin, the DPP’s China affairs director said, using shorthand for Taiwan’s formal name. bloomberg

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