Deciphering the Big China-Taiwan Meeting

Robert A. Manning

Politics, Asia

With elections coming in January, will the Xi-Ma encounter reinforce stability or be the harbinger of new cross-Strait tensions?

It was an unusually creative gesture for Xi Jinping to agree to an unprecedented meeting with Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou, the first such meeting between mainland and Taiwan heads of government in sixty-six years. Some even suggested a parallel with Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1972.

But when the dust settled in Singapore, it was a meeting that lasted fifty minutes, produced no agreements or obvious new directions in cross-Strait relations. Its main import was that it actually happened. The measure of its significance will only be evident after Taiwan’s presidential elections next January. Will the Xi-Ma encounter reinforce stability or be the harbinger of new cross-Strait tensions if, as expected, the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Tsai Ing-wen is Ma’s successor as president?

That concern was clearly what motivated Xi to set the extraordinary precedent of treating Taiwan, which Beijing considers merely a province, as an equal entity. Though they addressed each other only as “Mister,” that political fiction did not hide the reality of Xi’s flattery of Taiwan.

Xi’s motives were transparent. As is evident in the East and South China Seas, restoring what it sees as rightful Chinese sovereignty is at the heart of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy. After the return of Hong Kong and Macao, Beijing views Taiwan as the last piece of the puzzle to ending two centuries of humiliation.

Taiwan certainly was, until its recent preoccupation with maritime capabilities, the centerpiece of the first two decades of China’s rapid military modernization. Xi’s response to Ma’s suggestion that Beijing reduce its threatening deployment of hundreds of missiles across the Taiwan Strait as a gesture of good faith was not reassuring. Xi fatuously claimed the missiles were not targeting Taiwan.

With Taiwan’s January presidential elections looming, and the independence-leaning DPP far ahead of the ruling KMT party in the polls, Xi sought to reinforce the status quo and bolster the KMT. This was behind Xi’s rhetorical flourish, emphasizing blood ties, telling Ma, “We are brothers connected by flesh, even if our bones are broken.” Fear of Taiwan going its own way were clear. But in a Taiwan where those that came from the mainland in 1949 are fading, and a local Taiwanese (rather than Chinese) identity is growing, how will Xi’s words resonate?