Taiwan's incoming president seeks to quiet tensions with China

Enlarge Photo Taiwan's incoming president seeks to quiet tensions with China

Sun, May 18 05:48 AM

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) _ Taiwan swears in a new president Tuesday who promises a clean break with his predecessor's confrontational stance toward China. The soft-spoken Ma Ying-jeou contrasts sharply with the combative outgoing president, Chen Shui-bian.

Ma has pledged to reinvigorate Taiwan's sluggish economy and stabilize relations with China. The latter should mollify the United States, a longtime friend of Taiwan that is often caught in the crossfire when tensions flare between the two rivals.

Taiwan, an island of 23 million people, split from China in 1949, but China still considers it part of its territory. Taiwan has never declared formal independence, in part because China has threatened to attack if it does so.

As president, Chen challenged the already uneasy status quo by pushing policies that, if taken to their logical conclusion, would have led to formal independence. The policies angered both China and the United States, who viewed them as risky brinksmanship.

Ma favors a more cooperative approach. He wants to hitch Taiwan's economic wagon to China's boom and sign a still-undefined peace treaty with the mainland.

"Taiwan in the future will be a responsible stakeholder, meaning a peacemaker instead of a troublemaker," he said in an interview with The Associated Press last week. Even before taking office, his vice president met with Chinese leader Hu Jintao on China's island of Hainan and won agreement from Hu to allow a major expansion of Chinese tourist traffic to Taiwan.

They also discussed ending a nearly 60-year ban on direct flights between Taiwan and China. But the prospects for a peace treaty are uncertain at best.

China wants Taiwan to come under some form of Chinese rule again, as Hong Kong did when the British gave up the territory in 1997. One legacy of Chen's pro-independence push, however, is a populace that views itself as separate from China even more than before.

Two-thirds of Taiwan's people now identify themselves first as Taiwanese, rather than Chinese twice as many as when Chen came to power in 2000, according to polls. Chen de-emphasized Chinese history and culture in education, eliminated the name "China" from a slew of government companies and sought U.N. membership for the island under the name Taiwan, rather than its official title of the Republic of China.

Many voters agreed with him conceptually, but they also feared he might provoke a Chinese attack, jeopardizing their democratic freedoms and economy. "It's a good thing that Chen reminded people of Taiwan's separateness," said 26-year-old Chen Wan-yun of Taipei, the island's capital.

"But it is not good that he adopted a radical approach." Perhaps recognizing the shift in public mood, Ma promised in his election campaign that he would not discuss reunification in any talks with Chinese government officials.

He appeared to raise the bar further last week. "It is very difficult for us to see any unification talks, even in our lifetimes," the 57-year-old Ma told the AP. He has named Lai Hsin-yuan, a strong supporter of Taiwanese sovereignty, to the key position of China affairs coordinator.

The move incurred the wrath of hard-liners in his own Nationalist Party, which has traditionally favored reunification. Ma seems to be edging away from that stance, at least to some extent, said George Tsai of Taipei's Chinese Cultural University.

"The big achievement of Chen is to cause him to give more support to Taiwanese identity," he said. At home, the economy may be Ma's main challenge.

Annual growth slowed to less than 4.5 percent during Chen's eight years in office, down from 6 percent for most of the 1990s. Ma wants to expand high-tech trade, in which advanced electronic components made in Taiwan are shipped to China, where they are assembled into everything from laptops to modems in low-cost factories on China's east coast.

By exploiting this relationship, he believes, Taiwan can regain its position as one of Asia's fast-growing "economic tigers" along with Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea without sacrificing its cherished political separation from Beijing.

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