Apparently, when President Ma of the Republic of China (aka Taiwan) meets President Xi of the People’s Republic of China (aka Communist China) in Singapore this coming Saturday, they will avoid the use of any formal titles in talking with each other and simply address each other as “mister.”
No doubt, the meeting of the two leaders will be touted as a positive sign by the world at large. After all, it was only two decades ago that the mainland was firing missiles off the coast of the island as the citizens of Taiwan went to the polls to elect that country’s president.
Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou (L) listening to a question during an interview with Reuters in Taipei in this June 1, 2012 file photograph and Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) smiling before his meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China October 29, 2015. REUTERS/Pichi Chuang /Muneyoshi Someya.
Certainly President Xi’s willingness to meet with the leader of what he still considers to be a renegade province, and whose government is an affront to Chinese sovereignty, must be seen as a feather in the cap of President Ma and his policy of rapprochement with Beijing.
But of course context is everything here. More than likely the meeting is a sign that President Xi and his cohorts in Beijing recognize that the likelihood of President Ma being succeeded by someone from Ma’s own party, the Kuomintang (KMT), is nearly zero. If the polls are accurate, the new president of Taiwan will be Tsai Ing-wen, whose party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), does not accept the idea that there is “one China”—or, more precisely, that “one China” includes the island of Taiwan. By meeting with Ma, Xi will be establishing a new standard, a new high point, for relations across the strait. But it’s a high point that Xi will undoubtedly never allow Tsai to reach, refusing to meet her while she’s in office unless and until she accepts some version of a “one China” mandate.
President Xi, in short, will have artificially contrived a diplomatic state in which Tsai looks less successful than her predecessor and perhaps is even blamed by the international community for a decline in cross-strait relations.
Xi’s gambit will come with a price in the short term. The Taiwanese have grown increasingly wary of what closer ties to the mainland mean for their own self-rule. Contrary to Beijing’s expectations, the KMT’s effort to increase economic and cultural relations with the PRC has not created a groundswell within Taiwan for moving ties forward even more quickly. Indeed, the PRC’s recent refusal to keep its pledge for greater democratic self-rule in Hong Kong has emptied the PRC’s proposed “one country, two systems” formula for Taiwan of whatever little credibility it had left. It’s quite possible that Ma’s meeting with Xi will stoke popular distrust of the KMT’s outreach to the PRC even more, with negative consequences for the KMT in January’s election. However, this seems to be a price Xi is willing to pay for beginning to lay the framework for discrediting a Tsai administration.
One can hope that a new American administration won’t buy into the game Xi is playing. Indeed, if it were smart, it would use the precedent of the upcoming get-together as license for a meeting between the US president and Taiwan’s sometime early in the new term. Ties between the two countries are too important to be always handled by underlings.
Undoubtedly, Beijing would complain. But then, the White House spokesperson could simply say, “‘Mr. Rubio’ enjoyed his conversation with ‘Ms. Tsai’ and he looks forward to even more productive conversations in the future.”
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