Editorial
Taiwan’s pro-independence leader Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California’s Simi Valley on Wednesday was needed like a hole in the head.
I wonder what Reagan would have thought about the meeting. When the Republican stalwart paid the second state visit by a US president to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in April 1984 (Richard Nixon paid the first state visit in 1972, while Gerald Ford made an official visit in 1975), he underlined at a banquet hosted by his Chinese counterpart Li Xiannian the need for “mutual respect and mutual benefit” between China and the US, and he even tried out a few phrases in Mandarin.
Reagan, who passed away in 2004, also said: “There are differences between us, yes, differences that should be neither glossed over nor dented – denied, I should say. Yet we, the people of China and the United States, share a sincere desire for peace and prosperity, and we understand that by working together, emphasising our areas of agreement, everyone will benefit.”
Alas, his words of wisdom are out of fashion on Capitol Hill right now (again), where China bashing is one of the very few issues that the two sides of the aisle in Congress can agree on.
The Tsai-McCarthy meeting took place on the eve of President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang’s constructive meetings with French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Beijing yesterday.
Unlike many other top politicians in the 27-nation bloc who continue to defend unipolar Atlanticism, Macron is the most prominent proponent of the vision of European strategic autonomy, which necessarily entails a multipolar system of international relations.
I would like to see more heads of state and government as well as foreign ministers from the EU to adhere to his vision so that Europe could, for instance, play the badly needed role as a balancing force in the world’s conflict-ridden geopolitics.
Tsai’s visit to the US was officially dubbed “transit”. That’s a misnomer. In the travel industry, “transit” means just changing planes at the airport, while “stopover” customarily means staying at least overnight and leaving the airport. Well, the latter is what obviously happened during her trip via the US to and from Central America.
Tsai’s tour coincided with former Taiwan leader and ex-Kuomintang (KMT) chairman Ma Ying-jeou’s visit to mainland China, accompanied by a group of Taiwan students. They visited Fudan University in Shanghai yesterday. Ma was right when he said that advancing exchanges between young people across the Strait is “the most urgent task of our generation.”
Ma is the first former leader of the island, which Japan returned to Chinese rule at the end of World War II in 1945 after five decades of colonial occupation, to visit the Chinese mainland.
Well, Ma was also the island’s first leader who met a leader of the PRC – Communist Party of China (CPC) General Secretary Xi Jinping in Singapore on November 7, 2015. The Macau Post Daily published a special issue the following day, headlined: “Historic handshake promotes cross-Strait peace”.
Handshakes and constructive talks between politicians representing different concepts and ideas are what is urgently needed on the international stage, such as the Xi-Ma meeting in the Lion City 7 ½ years ago.
A spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry in Beijing has described Tsai’s “transit” through the US as “a serious violation of the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-US joint communiqués”, adding that “it seriously infringes upon China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and sends an egregiously wrong signal to the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces.”
The spokesperson also stressed that the Taiwan question “is at the core of China’s core interests and the first red line must not be crossed in China-US relations.”
Moreover, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the US has reaffirmed that the Taiwan question is “the bedrock of the political foundation of China-US relations and the first red line that should never be crossed in this bilateral relationship.”
The embassy spokesperson also said that “Tsai’s ‘transit’ was not so much a ‘transit’, but an attempt to seek breakthroughs and propagate ‘Taiwan independence’.”
Taiwan’s next leader is slated to be elected next January. I hope that Tsai’s successor will follow in Ma’s footsteps by pursuing, once again, a realistic cross-Strait approach, based on the 1992 Consensus (when both sides agreed that there is only one China in the world, and that the mainland and the island are inalienable parts of “one China”).
Let’s be realistic: “Taiwan independence” is a dead-end policy, and it is dangerous to boot. But also let’s be optimistic: Where there is a will, there is a way to achieve national reunification peacefully. It won’t be easy, it needs time, but it can be done – as long as the international community regards the matter as an internal affair of China.
– Harald Brüning
