Taiwan politician arrives in China
A top politician from Taiwan arrived in China on Monday for a six-day visit amid hope for warmer relations between the longtime foes.
The head of the island’s ruling party will meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao during a groundbreaking trip that follows the May 20 inauguration of a new Taiwanese president, Ma Ying-jeou, who is eager to fulfill a campaign pledge to improve ties. For China, the visit provides an opportunity ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games in August to project itself as a superpower committed to world peace.
Wu Poh-hsiung, who is chairman of Taiwan’s Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, said upon his arrival Monday in the eastern city of Nanjing that the visit could “create a win-win situation.”
The televised arrival ceremony marked the first break in two weeks of nearly 24-hour coverage of China’s May 12 earthquake. It opened with a minute of silence commemorating the more than 65,000 people killed in the magnitude 7.9 temblor. Chen Yunlin, director of the Taiwan Work Office of China’s Communist Party Central Committee, thanked Wu for his government’s pledge of $26 million for the quake relief fund.
“Currently, the mainland-Taiwan relations have entered a spring for peaceful development,” Chen said, according to the official New China News Agency.
Although the Taiwanese business community has a huge presence on the mainland, protocol makes it difficult for government officials to visit because China views Taiwan as a renegade province rather than an independent country. In 2005, then-Kuomintang Chairman Lien Chan broke the ice with a visit to China, but the event carried less weight because the party was out of office.
The Kuomintang led a protracted civil war against Mao Tse-tung’s Communist guerrillas before fleeing to Taiwan in 1949. But in recent years, it has favored rapprochement with the mainland in opposition to the Democratic Progressive Party, which was booted out of office in March elections.
“Beijing is clearly feeling more relaxed and confident since the election,” said Andrew Yang, secretary-general of the Taiwan-based Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies. Chinese leaders “want to bring Taiwan closer to the motherland. They feel they have nothing to lose by expanding economic ties and making Taiwan more dependent.”
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