Hands across the water

摘要

Ever since he was elected president in 2008, Ma Ying-jeou has sought to improve Taiwan's rocky relations with China. On November 7th in Singapore the world will see the culmination of these efforts, when the Taiwanese leader meets his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. The news is a surprise. It will be the first meeting between the two countries' leaders since the Communists' victory in the civil war in 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek's defeated Kuomintang (KMT) forces fled to the island fortress across the Taiwan Strait. No agreements will be signed in Singapore, nor any joint statement issued. The two sides will be careful how they refer to each other, Mr Xi especially not wanting to confer too much legitimacy on the leader of an island which the mainland claims as its own. Mr Ma's office says that the meeting will "consolidate cross-strait peace and maintain the status quo". That reassurance is necessary. Especially during Mr Ma's second term as president, many Taiwanese have grown increasingly unhappy over a flurry of agreements with China, 23 in all, promoting greater economic integration across the strait. Last year hundreds of thousands took to the streets of the Taiwanese capital, Taipei, in anti-trade protests led by students who also occupied the legislature. Their concerns were not only about jobs, but also about the political leverage that greater integration, negotiated largely in secret, might give the mainland.