The leaders of China and Taiwan to meet, amid widespread skepticism
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Version 0 of 1. BEIJING — The presidents of China and Taiwan may be making history when they meet for the first time this weekend, but the surprise summit has been greeted with suspicion and some anger in Taiwan, as it comes at extremely short notice just two months before elections there. Both governments said the two leaders, Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan, would meet in Singapore to discuss cross-strait ties, which have improved significantly since Ma took office in 2008. The meeting was immediately denounced by Taiwan’s opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as an attempt by Beijing to influence January’s presidential and parliamentary elections in favor of Ma’s Nationalist Party, also known as the Kuomintang (KMT). Ma, who will step down as Taiwan’s president next year, has made improving relations with China one of his top policies, with the signing of landmark investment and tourism deals. But the expected economic benefits from his pro-China stance have largely failed to arrive, experts said, with wages and growth stagnant in Taiwan. Now his KMT could face a stinging defeat in the elections at the hands of the DPP, opinion polls show. That has not gone down well in Beijing: The DPP has traditionally been much less favorable toward Communist China. [5 things you should know about Taiwan’s upcoming election] Experts said Beijing appeared to be trying to send a message to Taiwanese voters: that a vote for the KMT would be in their best interests, because it would lead to better ties with Beijing. But the meeting — with an unpopular lame-duck president — could easily backfire, they said. “The reception here hasn’t been positive at all,” said J. Michael Cole, a Taipei-based senior fellow with the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute. Cole said the meeting appeared to have been initiated by Beijing and was already seen by many people in Taiwan as an “11th-hour attempt to shake things up a bit in the KMT’s favor” ahead of the elections. But most of the frustration, Cole said, was directed at Ma, with anger surfacing on social media and on Taipei’s regular evening talk shows. A few dozen people also staged a brief demonstration outside the national legislature. Ma has insisted he would meet his Chinese counterpart only if he had substantial public support for such a meeting. But many people believe Ma lacks any popular mandate to meet Xi.The DPP is now trying to take advantage of the short notice and lack of public consultation before Saturday’s meeting. “This once again shows the Ma government’s tendency to do things in a black box, violate democracy and evade oversight, and the public will have difficulty accepting this,” the party said in a statement. Cole said Beijing and the KMT could be using the meeting to play on fears that a victory for the DPP might disturb cross-straits ties. But he said that the KMT’s attempt to play the pro-China card in the coming elections has failed so far. “It was promised for eight years by President Ma’s administration that closer ties to China would be the panacea to Taiwan’s economic problems — but that has not been the case,” Cole said. Instead, he said, voters in Taiwan in this election were fixated on domestic issues, improving the economy, the health-care system and social housing — “all things that affect everyday life.” Nathan Batto, a political scientist at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, agreed. “The effect of this is primarily to hurt the KMT, because it’s refocusing the election away from other concerns and back to China,” he said. “Definitely DPP candidates will try to paint Ma as too eager to get close to China.” The KMT candidate is so far behind in the polls that the party has all but lost the presidential race, Batto said. Its main hope is to retain control of the legislature, by focusing not on national issues but on its candidates’ local performance, “but Ma is now nationalizing the election,” he said. [In 2013 interview, Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, tells of plans to expand relations with China] Leaders of the two sides have not met since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party lost the Chinese civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communists and fled to Taiwan in 1949. The state the Nationalists established there eventually evolved into a proud and vibrant democracy. China, though, still views it as a renegade province and insists Taiwan will one day be taken back, by force, if necessary — especially if it tries to declare formal independence. Relations were frosty for decades, with the first formal meetings between lower-level officials beginning only after Ma took office. Saturday’s meeting has been carefully choreographed. It will take place on neutral ground in Singapore, a state with a majority ethnic Chinese population that has long enjoyed good relations with both sides. Zhang Zhijun, director of the Chinese cabinet’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said in a statement that Xi and Ma would meet in their capacity as “leaders of the two sides” of the Taiwan Strait and would address each other not as “president” but as “mister.” The formulation reflects China’s insistence that Taiwan and the mainland are part of a single Chinese nation, but it also affords both leaders equal status, possibly an attempt to blunt criticism in Taiwan that Ma is pandering to China.The two leaders will have dinner after their meeting but will not sign any agreements or hold a joint news conference, officials said. [Taiwan defined by conflicted identity, diplomatic isolation] Beijing is well aware that a previous attempt to influence elections in Taiwan backfired spectacularly. In 1996, then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin ordered war games and missile tests in the Taiwan strait in a bid to intimidate voters against reelecting President Lee Teng-hui, who China believed was moving the island closer toward formal independence. The crisis prompted President Bill Clinton to send two aircraft carriers through the Taiwan Strait, and he was also credited with helping Lee to a landslide election victory. These days, Beijing’s threat is more muted, although it has not gone away. Xi warned Taiwan in 2013 that political differences could not be passed down from generation to generation. But Beijing’s preferred solution — granting Taiwan the sort of autonomy that Hong Kong has as part of China — has little traction on the island, where most voters favor continuing with its de facto independence. Experts said it was unlikely that much would come out of the meeting, partly because Ma is a lame duck. “I don’t think he will be able to fundamentally change the nature of the Taiwan-China relation. He doesn’t have the public mandate to do anything like that,” Batto said. “That said, he is going to set a precedent that the leaders on the two sides of the strait can meet in person. You can’t revoke that precedent.” In China, Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University, called Saturday’s meeting a “historic event” but regretted that it did not take place earlier. “If it had happened two years ago, it is possible it would have led to substantial achievements,” he said.“It could have created a large economic effect across the strait. The two sides could have found a starting point to maintain cross-strait peace.” But with Ma stepping down soon, he added, “there won’t be any substantial and immediate influence from the meeting.” Read more: Photos: China’s rapid island-building strategy continues China rails at ‘hegemony’ as U.S. vows to continue sea patrols U.S. Navy alarmed at Beijing’s ‘Great Wall of sand’ in South China Sea Gu Jinglu contributed to this report. |