Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
April 14, 2008
Pg. 12
By Keith Bradsher
HONG KONG — Meetings in southern China over the weekend between top Chinese officials and Vice President-elect Vincent Siew of Taiwan have produced some progress on improving economic relations and reducing tensions across the Taiwan Strait, officials from both sides said Sunday.
Mr. Siew and President-elect Ma Ying-jeou will take office in Taipei on May 20 with a strong electoral mandate to reduce the hostility that has existed with Beijing for most of the past six decades. But Taiwan’s leaders and officials on the mainland each face strong domestic pressures not to make too many concessions too quickly or too easily.
Those domestic pressures are likely to limit their room to maneuver and force them to pursue limited agendas at first, focused on issues like tourism and charter flights, political analysts said.
“Peace talks and military confidence-building mechanisms will take longer, perhaps next year,” said Michael Kaocheng Wang, the director of the Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies at Tamkang University in Taipei.
The meetings this past weekend, held at a policy conference in Boao, on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, were never intended to produce specific deals and did not, said Stephen S. F. Chen, a retired top Taiwanese diplomat who advised Mr. Ma on security issues during the election campaign.
“It’s just a beginning,” Mr. Chen said. “It’s not a venue to go into specifics.”
China’s official Xinhua news agency reported Sunday that during a meeting late Saturday with Mr. Siew, President Hu Jintao of China declared that Taiwan and China faced a historic opportunity and needed to make joint efforts to achieve progress.
Various meetings at the conference in Boao “inspired us to think deeply about cross-Straits economic exchanges and cooperation under the new circumstances,” Mr. Hu said, according to Xinhua.
The 20-minute meeting on Saturday evening was followed on Sunday by a panel discussion at the conference, which included Mr. Siew, Commerce Minister Chen Deming of China and teams of industrialists and advisers on both sides.
The agenda covered issues that have been batted back and forth in talks for years: the introduction of weekend charter flights between Taiwan and the mainland, the expansion of the holiday charter flights that are already allowed, plus an easing of Taiwan’s stringent limits on visits by mainland Chinese tourists.
Violent protests last month in Tibet against Chinese rule have prompted Beijing officials from Mr. Hu on down to emphasize the importance of maintaining the unity of China. That makes this an especially difficult time for mainland officials to accept Mr. Ma’s proposed formula of “mutual nondenial”: that each side stop denying the existence of a separate government on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, without resolving questions of each government’s sovereignty.
The Chinese news media made a point of referring to Mr. Siew not as vice president-elect of Taiwan but rather as the chairman of the Cross-Straits Common Market Foundation, a Taiwan group seeking closer economic relations with the mainland.
The Tibet protests also forced Mr. Ma to take a more critical stance toward China in the final days before the election on March 22 — although Mr. Ma had already distanced himself from some members of his Nationalist Party in ruling out any political unification with the mainland for the foreseeable future.
April 14, 2008
Pg. 12
By Keith Bradsher
HONG KONG — Meetings in southern China over the weekend between top Chinese officials and Vice President-elect Vincent Siew of Taiwan have produced some progress on improving economic relations and reducing tensions across the Taiwan Strait, officials from both sides said Sunday.
Mr. Siew and President-elect Ma Ying-jeou will take office in Taipei on May 20 with a strong electoral mandate to reduce the hostility that has existed with Beijing for most of the past six decades. But Taiwan’s leaders and officials on the mainland each face strong domestic pressures not to make too many concessions too quickly or too easily.
Those domestic pressures are likely to limit their room to maneuver and force them to pursue limited agendas at first, focused on issues like tourism and charter flights, political analysts said.
“Peace talks and military confidence-building mechanisms will take longer, perhaps next year,” said Michael Kaocheng Wang, the director of the Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies at Tamkang University in Taipei.
The meetings this past weekend, held at a policy conference in Boao, on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, were never intended to produce specific deals and did not, said Stephen S. F. Chen, a retired top Taiwanese diplomat who advised Mr. Ma on security issues during the election campaign.
“It’s just a beginning,” Mr. Chen said. “It’s not a venue to go into specifics.”
China’s official Xinhua news agency reported Sunday that during a meeting late Saturday with Mr. Siew, President Hu Jintao of China declared that Taiwan and China faced a historic opportunity and needed to make joint efforts to achieve progress.
Various meetings at the conference in Boao “inspired us to think deeply about cross-Straits economic exchanges and cooperation under the new circumstances,” Mr. Hu said, according to Xinhua.
The 20-minute meeting on Saturday evening was followed on Sunday by a panel discussion at the conference, which included Mr. Siew, Commerce Minister Chen Deming of China and teams of industrialists and advisers on both sides.
The agenda covered issues that have been batted back and forth in talks for years: the introduction of weekend charter flights between Taiwan and the mainland, the expansion of the holiday charter flights that are already allowed, plus an easing of Taiwan’s stringent limits on visits by mainland Chinese tourists.
Violent protests last month in Tibet against Chinese rule have prompted Beijing officials from Mr. Hu on down to emphasize the importance of maintaining the unity of China. That makes this an especially difficult time for mainland officials to accept Mr. Ma’s proposed formula of “mutual nondenial”: that each side stop denying the existence of a separate government on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, without resolving questions of each government’s sovereignty.
The Chinese news media made a point of referring to Mr. Siew not as vice president-elect of Taiwan but rather as the chairman of the Cross-Straits Common Market Foundation, a Taiwan group seeking closer economic relations with the mainland.
The Tibet protests also forced Mr. Ma to take a more critical stance toward China in the final days before the election on March 22 — although Mr. Ma had already distanced himself from some members of his Nationalist Party in ruling out any political unification with the mainland for the foreseeable future.