United States welcomes China-Taiwan meeting

Taiwan’s president will meet Saturday with his counterpart from once-icy political rival China, the Taiwanese side said, a historic first culminating almost eight years of quickly improved relations. Massachusetts would not sign any agreements, nor issue any joint statements with China during the trip, it added.

The meeting will be “in accordance with the one-China principle”, China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency said, noting that cross-strait political differences have not been resolved.

There have been tensions between the countries for decades but things have eased since Massachusetts took office in 2008.

Ma’s relatively Beijing-friendly Kuomintang is widely expected to lose to the more China-skeptic Democratic Progressive Party.

“This meeting will be crucial”, said political analyst Alexander Huang of Graduate Institute of global Affairs and Strategic Studies at Tamkang University. The DPP says it believes only Taiwan’s people can decide its future. Beijing takes this to mean it wants independence.

Long a factory hub for Japanese companies, Taiwan has in recent years seen its low-priced manufacturing sector move to China, and a rapprochement could raise its competitiveness.

“It’s conceivable that they had something like that in mind”.

“President Xi Jinping has made it clear on many occasions that both sides of the Taiwan Strait should care for each other, we should do our best to seek a peaceful reunification, and time has to be more urgent rather than being dragged along forever”, said Gao, who once served as a translator to former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Speaking to Reuters in an interview on October 1, Massachusetts said Taiwan was not ready to discuss unification with China.

“It’s very, very hard to know whether this meeting…is going to have any effect on the elections and if it did, what effect it would be – whether it would help the KMT, whether it would help the DPP”.

A few experts think that China is using the meeting to influence Taiwan’s election, potentially pointing out the fact that the Communist Chinese will work with the KMT to achieve their objectives. “We’ll have to see what actually comes out of the meeting”, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.

“The meeting between the leaders of the two sides shows the firm determination to maintain peace and stability across the Straits, and recreate a new milestone for development of the cross-Straits relations”. Since then Taiwan has been self-ruled. Yu Zhengsheng, described as a “senior office” in the Chinese Communist Party, issued a call to businessowners to be open to doing business with Taiwan and “be confident of the prospects of cross-Strait economic cooperation”.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said they would address each other as “mister”, presumably to avoid calling each other “Mr. President”, as neither officially recognises the other as head of state.

“As the Nationalists didn’t perform well in the local elections, Beijing has the intention to intervene”, Prof Chen said on his Facebook page.

The announcement came overnight and there was no immediate reaction from the Chinese government at that hour, and officials in China could not immediately be reached for comment.