People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are ethnically Chinese and share the same ancestry, former Taiwanese President Ma Ying Jeou said Tuesday at the start of a historic visit to China that Taiwan’s ruling party has criticized. Ma, serving from 2008 to 2016, is the first former or current Taiwanese president to visit the mainland since the defeated ROC government fled to Taiwan in 1949 at the end of a civil war with the communists.
His visit comes at a time of great tension, as Beijing uses political and military means to try to pressure democratically governed Taiwan into accepting Chinese sovereignty. Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party has questioned his visit, just after Beijing won Honduras to its side on Sunday and brought the number of diplomatic allies the island has to 13.
China and Taiwan experienced a great moment of rapprochement during the presidency of Ma Ying Jeou, of Taiwan’s main opposition party, Kuomintang (KMT), to the point that he held a historic meeting in Singapore with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at the end of 2015, the first in more than 60 years of unilateral separation from the island. The KMT traditionally favors close relations with China, but strongly denies being pro-Beijing.
The CCP and the KMT defend cooperation based on “opposition to Taiwanese independence” and the defense of the 1992 Consensus, points on which the postulates coincide. The term “1992 Consensus” was created by Taiwanese politician and academic Su Chi to reflect an alleged tacit agreement between Taipei and Beijing to recognize that “there is only one China in the world”, although each side has interpreted it in their own way. . Ma’s visit is part of the KMT’s outreach to China in the hope of de-escalating tensions.
In 2016, the Democratic Progressive Party won the Taiwanese elections and, since then, tensions between Beijing and Taipei have been on the rise and escalated last summer after the visit to the island of the then president of the US Congress, Nancy Pelosi, strongly protested by the Chinese authorities.
Taiwan has been governed autonomously under the official name of the Republic of China since 1949, when the KMT nationalists retreated there after losing the Chinese civil war against the communists, so Beijing continues to consider it a rebel province and claims its sovereignty.
In remarks in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing at the Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum, where the man who celebrated the overthrow of China’s last emperor in 1911 and the start of a republic is buried, Ma praised Sun’s contributions. .
“The people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese, and both are descendants of the Yan and Yellow emperors,” Ma said, in comments provided by his office. Ma used Chinese words that mean people of Chinese ethnicity, instead of referring to his nationality. Descendants of the Yan and Yellow Emperors is an expression referring to a common ancestry for the Chinese. Most Taiwanese no longer identify as Chinese, according to surveys.
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing Wen has repeatedly offered talks with China but has been turned down because Beijing views her as a separatist. The president says that only the people of Taiwan can decide her future.
Ma said he hoped for peace: “We sincerely hope the two sides will work together to seek peace, avoid war and strive to revitalize China,” he said, again using an expression that refers to the Chinese people as an ethnic group rather than an ethnic group. nationality. “This is an unavoidable responsibility of the Chinese people on both sides of the Strait, and we must work hard.” Ma is not scheduled to meet any senior Chinese leaders on this 10-day trip.
