A tale of two Taiwanese presidents

It is probably no coincidence that former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou landed in Shanghai just a day before his successor Tsai Ing-wen left for a two-night visit to New York on Tuesday.

Officially described as just a personal trip, Ma’s visit to the mainland seems carefully staged to overshadow Tsai’s so-called “private.”transitthrough the United States, which Chinese officials have described as a “provocationdue to Beijing’s characterization of the autonomous island as a renegade province.

From his arrivals in New York and Shanghai, respectively the most populous cities in the United States and China and each country’s main financial and business center, to his effusive praise for the host government, the trips have had an eerie mirror-like quality.

The only difference has been where the praise has been directed.

“The bond between Taiwan and the United States is strong today,” Tsai said in New York, calling Taiwan a “beacon of democracy” in Asia and calling for closer ties between the island and the United States.

Ma, by contrast, on Thursday hailed China’s “effective control measures” in Wuhan after the COVID-19 outbreak there as a “contribution to all of humanity.” a report in Xinhua saying.

He also called for greater cross-strait cooperation and applauded the Chinese authorities for “preventing the large-scale spread of the virus,” apparently despite the global pandemic that followed.

‘Propaganda effect’

Tsai left Friday for official weekend visits to Guatemala and Belize, the ostensible main reason for her trip, which requires the two rounds of “transit” through the United States, but returns Tuesday for two nights. More in Los Angeles.

A planned meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has already drawn threats of “countermeasures” and “confrontation” from Beijing.

Ma leaves China for Taiwan on April 7, one day before Tsai’s return.

Austin Wang, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the reason for the reflected trip was likely the “international propaganda effect that Beijing hopes to achieve” by having Ma on the mainland during Tsai’s stays in USA.

“After all, Ma Ying-jeou is a former president, and from the attention of domestic and foreign media, his visit to China gives a sense of ‘balance,’ as if public opinion in Taiwan is not leaning towards the United States” , Wang told Radio Free Asia on Thursday.

The first leg of Tsai’s US visit was mostly without controversy, with Beijing appearing more concerned about her plans to meet McCarthy next week. Taiwanese and US officials have been careful to avoid a blowout in relations between Washington and Beijing amid efforts to cool months of rising tensions.

Tsai on Thursday night, for example, gave a closed-door speech at the InterContinental New York Barclay Hotel, with uninvited media – after receiving a global leadership award from the Hudson Institute, a conservative foreign policy think tank.

A leaked recording obtained by the washington post He quoted Tsai as saying that Taiwan wanted to cool relations with Beijing amid growing threats and predictions of an invasion, but also sought to maintain a status quo in which the island is not under Chinese control.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a wake-up call for all of us and served as a reminder that authoritarianism does not cease its belligerence against democracy,” Tsai said. “Taiwan has also long endured the danger of living next door to an overbearing neighbor.”

‘Your battle is our battle’

At the same event Thursday night, Hudson Institute President John Walters praised Tsai, who was presented by the think tank with a leadership award previously given to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for resisting what he called the Beijing aggression.

“The Chinese Communist Party fears her because she and Taiwan are an inspiration to the Chinese people who aspire to be free and yearn for democracy,” Walters said, according to recording of the event obtained by The charge. “Their battle, their battle, is our battle.”

It is the kind of language that Beijing has described as a “red line” and a violation of the “One China” principle that Taiwan belongs to China.

In a news conference On Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning responded to Tsai’s praise for closer US-Taiwan ties by saying it showed that her trip to the US was not just a ” transit” on the way to Central America, but a visit in the service of “Taiwan independence”. ”

“Let me emphasize that no matter what the Taiwan authorities say or do, it will not change the fact that Taiwan is part of China,” Mao added. “No one and no force can stop the reunification of China.”

Wang, of the University of Nevada, said the Biden administration would likely hope to weather the two stages of “transit” through the United States by Tsai, a close ally, as it seeks to re-engage with Beijing, with the leader from Taiwan forced to accept. that reality

“The United States is currently in a position to wait and see if there will be any changes or opportunities to re-engage with China after the two sessionswhich may explain the low-key attitude of the US towards Tsai Ing-wen’s traffic management,” he said.

“Taiwan is mostly in a relatively passive position.”

private citizen

Tsai’s visit has apparently already been curtailed, and reported plans for another speech, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library next Wednesday, when she meets with McCarthy, have apparently been cancelled. amid growing concerns of the Biden administration.

Melissa Giller, the library’s director of marketing, confirmed that Tsai would not speak at the event and denied that was the plan.

“We just said that we had invited her,” Giller told RFA on Friday. “No speech has been cancelled, as there was never a speech set up.”

While Ma and Tsai’s trips outside of Taiwan have been described as private, rather than official trips, one of the trips is clearly more private than the other, according to Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the USA.

Glaser told RFA that Ma is “a private citizen and as such can speak for himself” but, unlike Tsai, “not for the rest of the citizens of Taiwan.” She said Tsai’s trip would serve to cement ties between the United States and Taiwan.

“The success of a transit should not be measured by whether or not there is a breakthrough. I hope the transit highlights the close relationship between the United States and Taiwan, including our shared interests and values,” Glaser said, adding that Beijing needed to look inward.

“There are many drivers of change in the US-China-Taiwan dynamic,” he explained, “but the most important is the increasingly coercive nature” of Beijing’s recent approach to cross-strait relations.

upcoming elections

The travels of the two leaders, in the end, appear to have drawn battle lines for the January 2024 presidential election on the autonomous island, which will decide Tsai’s successor.

The president has a limited term to run again, but her vice president, Lai Ching-te, is expected to be the candidate of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, and he praised Tsai’s visit.

“I am proud to see President Tsai represent our country with dignity. No matter what difficulties we face, Taiwanese are easy-going, pragmatic and confident in who we are,” Lai tweeted Thursday.

Meanwhile, Ma’s Kuomintang party won the Taipei mayoral race in November and hopes to retake the presidency next year.

In the midst of his trip, a spokesman for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, Zhu Fenglian, said in a speech on Thursday that Taiwan’s 23 million people would “enjoy tangible benefits after unification” and vowed that they could maintain “a social system different from that of the continent”. ”

However, party spokesman Alfred Lin said a Kuomintang victory next year does not necessarily mean imminent reunification. The opposition party simply wanted to “engage in peaceful exchanges and coexist” with Beijing, he said, maintaining the status quo.

“The Kuomintang has always opposed the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ model and has never advocated unification with the Chinese Communist Party, as we don’t want to live under such an authoritarian regime,” Lin said, asking for patience. .

“When a small country is facing a big one, we must have wisdom and patience,” he said. “We may never win this game, but we must never lose it. The best way for Taiwan is to keep this game.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster