Beijing's Threat Would Hurt Feelings Between People On Both Sides.

Beijing's Threat Would Hurt Feelings Between People On Both Sides.

[ Up ]

Nov. 28, 2000 ---
Mainland China’s fears that Taiwan will declare independence are overblown, a senior Kuomintang’s official told Beijing’s top envoy on Taiwan yesterday.

“Mainland China always thinks there is a danger that Taiwan will suddenly declare independence. I think they really don’t need to think in this direction,” Wu poh-hsiung, vice chairman of KMT, told reporters after meeting Wang Daohan.

“Taiwan’s constitutional system and the political reality are that there is no chance of this happening,” Wu said, echoing remarks he made to Wang, chairman of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait.

Mainland China’s frequent threat to use force to resolve the Taiwan issue “hurt feelings between people on both sides”, Wu told reporters in Shanghai.

Mainland China has been worried about Taiwan’s drift toward separatism since the mid-‘90s, when then President Lee Teng-hui tried to raise the island’s international profile by travelling to the United States and lobbying for a United Nations seat for Taipei.

Beijing, which says it would invade Taiwan if it declares independence, has grown even more suspicious since President Chen Shui-bian and his pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party took power in May, ending 50 years of KMT rule.

Beijing has refused to deal with Chen and instead has courted opposition parties such as the KMT which are formally committed to unification. Wu’s 12-day tour marked the highest-level visit to mainland China By KMT since 1949.

Wang, a confidant of mainland Chinese President Jiang Zemin, told Wu that China’s weakness and internal divisions had brought suffering and foreign invasion in the past.

“On this point, I think there is much agreement,” Wang said at the start of his one-hour meeting with Wu.

Wu’s spokesman, Lee Ching-ping, said Wu clarified the KMT policy, which is to follow Taipei’s longstanding national unification guidelines and return to a 1992 consensus which enabled cross strait talks a year later.

In 1992, mainland China and Taiwan --- rivals since the KMT lost to the Communists in a civil war in 1949 and moved to the island --- agreed each side would adhere to a “one China” principle without agreeing on definitions of the term.

Nov. 27, 2000 ---

Chemist Lee Yuan-tseh hammered out a four-point recommendation that urges the president to address the “one China” dilemma in line with the constitution, saying that power resides with the people the task force also suggested any proposal to change Taiwan’s political status quo must be approved by its inhabitants first.

“Wisdom, responsibility and caution are the government’s guiding principle in dealing with mainland China,” President Chen told visiting former U.S. vice President Dan Quayle.

　“A unified China, in the past and future, cannot be without Taiwan. A democracy, like today’s Taiwan cannot be without sovereignty. Before the mainland is democratized, there cannot be a unified China.”

This is the spirit of the constitution of the Republic of China.

The long-awaited consensus by the presidential advisory committee on mainland policy, it recommends that President Chen Shui-bian “improve relations with the mainland, deal with cross-strait disputes and answer the other side’s “one China” call in accordance with the constitution of the Republic of China.”

This statement that the supreme goal of the DPP, was replaced by the spirit and letter of the constitution.

However, the statement is not equal to accepting Beijing’s political terms. China and the People’s Republic of China are two different ideas. Citizens of the ROC are living in Taiwan for about 55 years in which our young people looked as Taiwanese only, because of long time Beijing’s threat was dividing Taiwanese people into anti-China’s emotion.

Taiwan needs your help.