China-Taiwan Tensions Thaw
A senior Taiwan envoy broke the ground with a visit to China, but the road ahead is expected to be long and sometimes bumpy, diplomats said.
The five-day visit by Taiwan envoy Koo Chen-fu that ended Sunday was marked by sometimes pointed exchanges with Chinese officials. The two sides agreed to keep talking, but did not make headway on the key question: the future of Taiwan's status.
"We support such frank exchanges of opinion," said Sheu Ke-sheng, vice chairman of the Taiwan government's Mainland Affairs Council.
Western diplomats suggested that the road to a full rapprochement would not be an easy one.
"This whole visit sort of shows how slow it's going to be," one Western diplomat said.
"The outcome is very limited. It's not an earth-shattering breakthrough," the diplomat said of the consensus reached between Koo and his mainland counterpart, Wang Daohan.
"It could get even harder," he said of talk aimed at reunification.
Beijing had suspended dialogue after Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui made a private visit to the United States in mid-1995 to try to break the island out of diplomatic isolation.
The following year, China staged menacing war games and lobbed missiles into waters off Taiwan ahead of the island's first direct presidential elections.
Koo's visit highlighted the ocean of mistrust and deep-seated differences between the two, analysts said.
Koo repeatedly lectured China on democracy, a line that grates with Beijing.
Beijing tried to arm-twist Taipei into opening political negotiations aimed at reunification. Taipei has resisted, arguing that reunion was possible only after Beijing embraced democracy.
Chinese Nationalists lost a civil war to Communists in 1949 and fled into exile on Taiwan, where they moved their Republic of China government.
Jiang Zemin met Koo in his capacity as general secretary of the Communist Party instead of state president, apparently to avoid the appearance of government-to-government contact.
It was the highest-level contact between the two rivals on Chinese soil in almost five decades.
China has been wooing Taiwan to hold party-to-party talks between the Communists and the Nationalists, but the island has resisted and insisted on government-to-government talks between Taipei and Beijing.
Both camps addressed each other's president as "mister" instead of by their official titles.
One Hong Kong-based China watcher said Koo's visit could be a shot in the arm for Taiwan's ruling Nationalist Party in legislative and mayoral elections in December.
"In some ways, it's intended to help the Nationalists as they move towards the elections," said the Western analyst who asked not to be identified.
China is worried the Nationalists' majority in the legislature would shrink considerably in the polls and that pro-independence opposition polticians would have more say.
Taipei denies Beijing's claims the island is pushing for independence and says it is committed to reunification.
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