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'1992 CONSENSUS' CANNOT BE ACCEPTED SINCE IT DOESN'T EXIST: PRESIDENT

Central News Agency

2005-05-03 18:10:32

    Kiribati, May 3 (CNA) President Chen Shui-bian on Tuesday rejected the existence of the so-called "1992 consensus" and said that he welcomes Chinese President Hu Jintao to come to Taiwan and search the nation's records to see if he can locate any written evidence of such an agreement.

    The president made the remarks at an informal meeting with Taiwan journalists in Kiribati on the second leg of his three-nation diplomatic tour of the South Pacific, which also includes the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu.

    President Chen spoke as Taiwan's main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan wound up his eight-day historic visit of China.

    Lien met with Hu, who concurrently serves as general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) , Friday and both unveiled their cross-strait vision for peace, saying that they oppose Taiwan independence and insist on the "1992 consensus, " referring to an alleged tacit agreement between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait on the meaning of "one China" as being interpreted independently on each side after delegates from Taipei and Beijing met in Hong Kong in 1992.

    The president has said before that there was no consensus reached during the 1992 Hong Kong talks, only "a spirit of 1992, " or a willingness to talk despite a lack of agreement, which led to the first high-level cross-strait meeting after a hiatus of nearly five decades the following year.

    Chen noted that during a telephone conversation with Lien prior to his departure to China April 25, he told Lien that the "1992 consensus" simply doesn't exist, and that it was a term coined by Su Chi, a former Mainland Affairs Council chairman, in April 2000. No such term existed between 1992 and 2000, the president added.

    The president said that the KMT and the CPC themselves don't see eye to eye on what the "1992 consensus" stands for.

    The KMT advocates different interpretations of "one China, " but the CPC has never agreed to this; instead, it simply advocates its own version of the "one China" principle. If both sides cannot even agree on this point, how can there be any consensus at all? the president asked.

    The president said that he has asked former Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) Vice Chairman Hsi Hwei-yow, who was in charge of the Hong Kong talks, about the issue and was told that there was no "1992 consensus."

    Koo Chen-fu, the late SEF chairman, also said in a book that no conclusions were reached after the Hong Kong talks, and that Taiwan delegates only mentioned whether it was possible to have different verbal interpretations to allow the shelving of the dispute over the "one China" principle, but China did not agree to this.

    The president said that he "cannot recognize or accept the '1992 consensus' if it does not even exist."

(By Lilian Wu)

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