Taiwan’s Ma visits Xi, whose intentions he trusts

Former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou met with Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in Beijing on Wednesday, their first meeting since Singapore in November 2015.

The latest Xi-Ma meeting came ahead of a summit between United States President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Washington on Wednesday US time. 

During the meeting, Ma said the Chinese nation could not bear for a war to break out in the Taiwan Strait. He said he believes that leaders on both sides have the wisdom to maintain a peaceful and stable environment in the region for economic development.

Xi said there is nothing that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait cannot discuss, and that there is also no power that can separate them. 

“People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait long for peace in their homes and harmonious coexistence with their families,” Xi said. “To this end, we must promote the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations.”

“As long as the country is not divided and we recognize that both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese and one family, we can sit down and communicate with each other,” he said.

He added that the communication in the cross-Strait relations must be based on the principle of the “1992 Consensus.”

The 1992 Consensus was achieved in a meeting between the semi-official representatives of the CCP-led People’s Republic of China (PRC) of mainland China and Kuomintang (KMT)-led Republic of China (ROC) of Taiwan. 

The CCP said the 1992 Consensus means that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to “one China,” which is solely represented by the PRC. The KMT understanding of the consensus is “one China, different interpretations,” meaning that China can be interpreted as either PRC or ROC. 

The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the ruling party of Taiwan, has never acknowledged the 1992 Consensus. The DPP’s leader Lai Ching-te won the island’s presidential election on January 13 and will replace Tsai Ing-wen as the new Taiwanese President on May 20. 

KMT’s stance

On January 8, Ma said in an interview with Germany’s DW that the best approach is to communicate and cooperate with China as Taiwan can never win a war against China. 

He said that, in cross-strait relations, he trusted Xi, who he insisted harbored no plan to invade the island. He also said Taiwan should avoid boosting its defense expenses as that would provoke China.

Following those January comments by Ma, Hou You-ih, then the KMT’s presidential candidate, said he had different thoughts than Ma. He said he did not place unrealistic hopes on “one country, two systems.”

Ma’s latest trip to China has drawn controversy among top KMT leaders. KMT Chairman Eric Chu reportedly took leave for a family trip to the US starting in late March. 

KMT Vice Chairman Andrew Hsia, who chaired a meeting of the party’s standing committee on March 27, said the Party highly appreciates Ma’s visit to Beijing and wishes for its success.

However, Hsia is leading a KMT delegation to meet with US think tanks and lawmakers in Washington this week. On April 8, he met with some officials in the US State Department. 

“Ma’s China trip is not only a big political event, but also a fight of ideologies and stances,” a Zhejiang-based columnist using the pen name “Xia Jie” says in an article posted on Wednesday. “How the DPP and KMT will react to Ma’s ‘trip of peace’ will result in different situations in Taiwan.”

“In the past, Eric Chu had a friendly political stance towards mainland China. But in recent years, he has clearly shown his stance of getting closer to the US and staying away from the mainland,” a Hubei-based writer called “Dabaihua” says in an article. “It seems that Chu wants to avoid commenting on Ma’s China trip by secretly departing Taiwan.”

The writer says Chu has also faced serious criticism within his party after he closed the KMT’s Huang Fuxing branch, or the National Veterans Committee, which firmly opposed Taiwan independence, last month. 

He says it’s now urgent for Beijing to bring out a message that it has tried its best to achieve peaceful reunification and will not allow anyone to separate Taiwan from China. 

Taiwan-based Hong Kong commentator Yau Ching-yuen says on his YouTube channel that Beijing may have overestimated Ma’s influence on Taiwanese politics.

Citing a recent survey conducted by the National Chengchi University, Yau says only 2.4% of people in Taiwan recognize themselves as Chinese. He says most Taiwanese oppose Beijing’s “one country, two systems” approach after seeing its failure in Hong Kong.

‘Useful idiot’

In his latest trip to China, Ma did not carry any official title and was called “Mr Ma” by Xi. In return, he called Xi “general secretary” and “Mr Xi.”

Prior to this meeting, Ma led a group of young Taiwanese people to visit Guangdong, Shaanxi and Beijing on April 1-9. He visited China’s anti-Japan war museum in Beijing on Monday. 

Ma is desribed as a “useful idiot” in remarks Tuesday by Yu Tsung-chi, a retired major general in Taiwan and the dean of the National Defense University’s Fu Hsing Kang College. Yu sees Ma as being used by Beijing to arouse anti-Japan sentiment and advocate unification with Taiwan.

Yu says Beijing wants to use people’s memories of KMT’s eight-year war of resistance against Japan in 1937-1945 to elicit a sense of solidarity with the modern KMT and erode Taiwan’s relationship with Japan and the US.

Whether or not the “idiot” charge is deserved, Ma made a careless mistake during his latest meeting with Xi, according to Taiwanese media. 

In his opening speech, Ma originally wanted to say that “the Chinese nation (Zhonghua Minzu)” had faced a century of humiliation in the past but is now marching towards the road of revitalization. 

But he mistakenly pronounced the subject as “the ROC (Zhonghua Minguo),” a term which CCP leaders did not expect or want to hear in the meeting. He corrected himself immediately.

Read: Beijing reminds Taiwanese to pick the ‘right’ leaders

Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3