NOTWITHSTANDING HIS reduced margin of victory, the weekend re-election of Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou (with 51.6 per cent of the vote) represents a significant vote of confidence in his policy of rapprochement with mainland China.
His party, the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), which has governed the island for all but one electoral term, including during four decades of martial law, also retained a parliamentary majority.
The last four years, despite slowing growth, has taken the two states’ annual bilateral trade to some $145 billion and helped to cushion the export-led economy from the global downturn. Now China has become Taiwans top trading partner. Flights between the two are running at 100 a day while some 2.6 million Chinese tourists have visited the island, spending over $3 billion. Some 200,000 Taiwanese workers in mainland China flew home in recent days on the new flights, many of them no doubt to support Ma’s re-election.
His victory was welcomed by the People’s Republic, by the country’s international guarantor, the US, and by business leaders. The better economic relations, facilitated not least by the 2010 Economic Co-operation Framework Agreement (ECFA) which slashed hundreds of tariffs on Taiwan exports to the mainland, seem likely to continue improving.
The political relationship remains very edgy, however. China still regards Taiwan, born out of the defeat and flight in 1949 of the KMT, as part of its territory – the two have been in a formal state of war since then – and Beijing works hard, and largely successfully, to deny the democratic state international recognition and links. The cross-straits rhetoric has been less bellicose and bullying recently but the issue is one that has considerable salience in China and senior politicians periodically play the nationalist Taiwan card much as they fan anti-Japanese sentiment to deflect from domestic difficulties.
Ma says his priority will be to work on the “easier” economic issues in the bilateral relationship. Political progress on issues like a peace treaty and the 1,500 Chinese missiles aimed at the island will have to wait. “There is no rush to open up political dialogue. It’s not a looming issue,” he said after the election. While the narrow defeat of pro-independence Tsai Ing-wen and her opposition Democratic Progressive Party reflects support for closer relations with China, the majority of Taiwanese and the KMT itself do not support unification with the mainland. It will remain a tense relationship.