China-Taiwan ties in focus as Xi Jinping meets KMT chairman

The chairmen of the Chinese Communist party and Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang party have met for the first time in six years as the two sides in one of the world's most dangerous bilateral relationships attempt to maintain peace and cordial relations.

President Xi Jinping, in his role as chairman of the Communist party, welcomed Eric Chu from the democratically elected KMT in Beijing on Monday morning.

The meeting came just a week after earthquake-struck Nepal rejected offers of aid from Taiwan so as not to offend Beijing, which insists that no government in the world should recognise independently governed Taiwan as a separate country.

In the meeting, Mr Chu said he hoped Taiwan would be able to play a greater role in international organisations and activities and that Beijing would allow Taipei more "room for development" on the international stage, according to Chinese media reports.

Only the Vatican and a handful of Latin American, African and Pacific Island states still recognise Taiwan as a nation, even though the island has been governed independently since the KMT fled there after losing a civil war to the Communists in 1949.

China considers Taiwan to be part of its territory and has long proclaimed the right to take the island by force.

When current President Ma Ying-jeou was elected in 2008, the KMT launched a policy of engagement with its old adversary.

A general election scheduled for early next year is being seen as a test of how popular this engagement policy is among Taiwan's 23m people.

With its political fate tied so closely to warming cross-strait relations, the KMT has increasingly found itself in the unenviable position of defending Beijing's actions.

"The Ma administration often finds itself defending Beijing or denying that Beijing is behaving badly because it does not want its policy of engaging the mainland to be seen as a failure," said J Michael Cole, senior fellow based in Taipei at the University of Nottingham's China Policy Institute.

Last week Taiwan's foreign minister said Nepal had rejected the island's offer of a 20-person rescue team in the wake of a devastating earthquake on April 25 but denied diplomatic pressure was behind that decision.

The minister said the Nepalese government had decided to first accept aid from neighbouring countries but he was unable to explain why assistance from Japan was accepted even though Tokyo is 1,500km further from Kathmandu than Taipei.

Offers of help from Britain, 10,000km away, were also accepted by Nepal.

Beijing rushed to send aid in the wake of the Nepal tremor and Chinese state media was filled with images of Chinese rescue teams pulling people from the rubble.

"It is not clear whether it was China that ordered Nepal not to accept aid from Taiwan or if it was the Nepalese being careful not to offend China but it is very sad lives were probably lost because of political considerations," said Bruce Jacobs, Professor of Asian Languages and Studies at Monash University in Melbourne. "There is a precedent for this sort of thing - in 1999 when there was a huge earthquake in Taiwan, Beijing stopped Russian planes from delivering aid through Chinese airspace and demanded that the Red Cross only deliver aid to Taiwan via the mainland."

Beijing's rejection of Taiwan's application to join its nascent Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has also damaged the KMT's argument that closer ties are yielding results.

The enormous "Sunflower Movement", when student activists occupied Taiwan's parliament for nearly a month last year, was an explicit rejection of the KMT's endorsement of a services trade agreement with the mainland.

Beijing's rejection of full universal suffrage for Hong Kong, which prompted the student-led "Umbrella Revolution" protests late last year, is also seen in Taiwan as a warning of what happens to territories that fall under Beijing's control.

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation