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Taiwan's talks with China to get more difficult: official

ROC Central News Agency

2011/10/07 17:32:14

Washington, Oct. 6 (CNA) Due to internal differences in Taiwan, the winner of next year's presidential election will face more hurdles in talks with mainland China due to a diminished political mandate, a senior adviser to President Ma Ying-jeou said Thursday in the United States.

Su Chi, a former secretary-general of the National Security Council, made the remarks in a speech at the University of Maryland in memory of the late Chiu Hungdah, who was a professor at the university and a well-known scholar of international law.

Su said he did not agree with the views of some who think cross-Taiwan Strait relation will be under heightened tension next year. In China, there will be a political transfer in which the helm of the nation will be handed to the next generation of leaders. On the economic front, meanwhile, it will go from an export-oriented economy to a consumer one, he said.

These factors, coupled with rising calls for political participation, will be enough to occupy China's attention, Su said.

But he also predicted that whichever camp wins the Jan. 14 presidential election -- blue or green -- it will do so by a smaller vote margin.

This narrower margin will mean that whichever side wins, the winner's mandate will be diminished and there will be more hurdles in future talks with China.

In the 2008 presidential election, President Ma Ying-jeou of the blue camp won overwhelmingly with a margin of more than 2.21 million out of more than 13 million votes cast.

Many of the people who attended the speech expressed concern about how the sovereignty dispute will affect the progress of bilateral relations across the strait.

China's concept of sovereignty has been too rigid, Su said. Similarly, he went on, everything in Taiwan can be related to sovereignty and one can often hear the phrase "selling out sovereignty," Su noted.

He said that many countries in Europe are more flexible on the issue and that"the two sides of the Taiwan Strait should not be too rigid on the issue of sovereignty."

He said the unification vs. independence issue occupies the political lives of Taiwanese people, but in reality, their lives have nothing to do with the issue.

The development of cross-strait relations should cast aside the disputes on unification vs. independence so as to find space for co-existence in the gray areas, said Su. (By Jay Chou and Lilian Wu) ENDITEM/J