Thursday, 16 February 2017

America’s affirmation of the one-China policy pleased Taiwan, too

THE idea that China and Taiwan might be separate countries, rather than estranged parts of “one China”, is anathema in Beijing. So on February 9th, when Donald Trump told his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, that America would respect the one-China policy after all (having previously questioned this polite fiction), Chinese officials were profoundly relieved. So, oddly, was Taiwan’s government, which thought that questioning the policy had been bad for Taiwan and scrapping it would have been worse.

That is remarkable. After all, Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party rejects the one-China policy and says the island is already independent. Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president, cannot even bring herself to utter the words “1992 consensus”—the name for a deal between China and the Kuomintang party (KMT), now the island’s opposition, which affirmed the notion of one China but said the two sides had different interpretations of it. So why was her government pleased?

Since coming to office last year, Ms Tsai has presented herself as cautious, responsible and predictable—as different as possible from the previous DPP president,...Continue reading

from Asia http://ift.tt/2ku6med
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT

No comments:

Post a Comment