Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen attended an inauguration ceremony Wednesday in Taipei as she won her 2nd term as president in January. Since then, she has led a successful fight against Covid-19.
Bloomberg QuickTake’s Kurumi Mori asks Lev Nachman, Fulbright research fellow in Taiwan, what’s next for the island.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen urged China’s Xi Jinping to “find a way to co-exist” with the island’s democratic government, as she started her second term riding high with a record approval rating and a surge in U.S. support.
In a speech after a pared-down inauguration ceremony Wednesday in Taipei, Tsai, 63, issued one of her most forceful calls yet for an equal dialogue with Beijing. Xi’s government cut off direct communications across the Taiwan Strait during Tsai’s first four years in office, citing her refusal to accept that both sides belong to “one China.”
“Cross-strait relations have reached a historical turning point. Both sides have a duty to find a way to co-exist over the long term and prevent the intensification of antagonism and differences,” Tsai said. “I also hope that the leader on the other side of the strait will take on the same responsibility, and work with us to jointly stabilize the long-term development of cross-strait relations.”
Tsai called for “peace, parity, democracy and dialogue” in relations between the two sides and reiterated her opposition to unification with China under “one country, two systems” like the framework used in Hong Kong. She also pledged to build core industries including 5G and other information and communication technologies, bio-technology, medicine, defense and renewable energy.
“Taiwan’s relationship with the U.S. will continue to warm up as the U.S-China relationship continues to break down,” Stephen Tan, president of the Taipei-based Cross-Strait Policy Association, said before Tsai’s speech. “As long as the U.S.-China relationship remains tense, cross-strait ties won’t improve. All Taiwan can do, and Tsai is expected to do, is to avoid being provocative and changing the status quo, but also not giving in.”
The event marks another historic high point for Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party, which has grown over the past four decades from a loose band of pro-independence dissidents to become Taiwan’s dominant political bloc. A landslide election victory in January reaffirmed the DPP’s control of the executive and legislative branches and left the Kuomintang — who ruled Taiwan for much of the time since the Chinese civil war ended in 1949 — stuck in the opposition.
Tsai begins her second term with an approval rating of 61%, the highest since she took office in May 2016, according to a survey by broadcaster TVBS released Monday.
The DPP’s rise has upended efforts to by Xi, the Chinese president, to use his country’s economic might to draw Taiwan toward a unification deal. Tsai views Taiwan as a sovereign nation and has rejected Beijing’s “one-China” bottom line.
“Beijing has given up on hoping for demonstrations of ‘sincerity’ from Tsai — partly because they set the bar too high and partly because they don’t believe she is sincere anyway,” said Jonathan Sullivan, director of China programs at the University of Nottingham. “None of the moderation that Tsai has shown has been good enough to negate the preordained opinion in Beijing that she is an independence wolf in status-quo sheep’s clothing.”
In her first term, Tsai repeatedly benefited from Donald Trump’s feuding with China, holding an unprecedented phone call with the U.S. president in December 2016 and securing Taiwan’s first American fighter jet deal in three decades. Tsai’s support for pro-democracy protests in the former British colony of Hong Kong last year helped her consolidate her China-skeptic base and secure re-election.
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