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Updated Monday, February 20, 2012 0:06 am TWN, By Joe hung

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Xi will be in no rush for unification

The treatment the United States gave Xi Jinping during his brief American tour shows clearly to the world Washington acknowledges he is the heir to Hu Jintao as the ruler of China for the next eight years. Xi will succeed Hu as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the end of this year and will be automatically elected president of the People's Republic next year. Unless something untoward happens, Xi will have a second term of four years, and there is no reason why he will follow the Hu line in dealing with Taiwan for the first two years of his first term and then come up with a Xi line.

As a matter of fact, Hu and Jiang Zemin before him did the same. The Jiang line stressed preclusion of independence for Taiwan. He proclaimed the eight-point Jiang doctrine after he had emerged out of the shadow of Deng Xiaoping. The doctrine, adopted in 1995 shortly before President Lee Teng-hui's visit to his alma mater Cornell University, reaffirms Beijing's denial of the use of force against “any possible interference from foreign powers in China's unification through a Taiwan independence plot.” Two years after he succeeded Jiang in toto, Hu made known his “peaceful development” line. There is no threat of war for unification by force of arms and Beijing wants to peacefully develop relations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait to maintain the status quo.

It takes about two years for Xi to consolidate his power. So there will be no special mention of how to solve the question of Taiwan in the Chinese Communist Party's yearend national congress where Xi will officially take over from Hu as its general secretary. Xi will pick up where Hu leaves to continue peaceful development of cross-strait relations, now that President Ma Ying-jeou has been re-elected.

However, like Hu before him, Xi wants to be remembered for some contribution to Chinese unification, albeit it may come about decades after he steps down as leader of the People's Republic in 2020. It is anybody's guess what he will adopt as a Xi line, but one thing is certain: No impatient call for an end to the technically still existing state of war between Taiwan and China.

Of course, Chinese unification, which Beijing likes to call Chinese reunification, remains Beijing's supreme and ultimate Taiwan policy objective, but its leaders are now in no haste to hasten Taiwan's coming back to the Chinese fold. A much more self-confident China, which has replaced Japan as the world's second largest economy, can and will take it easy in its lasting struggle for Chinese reunification, which Beijing is more than certain will come sooner or later without resorting to the use of force of arms, for Taiwan is just like Monkey in the Journey to the West who could not fly away from the palm of the Buddha no matter how hard he might try. In other words, the agenda of Chinese reunification is on the farthest backburner of Beijing's Taiwan policy-makers. All they have to do is to wait, wait until the time comes for the fruit to turn overripe and fall from the tree onto the ground for them to pick it up. It may take decades but it does not matter.

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