President Ma deserves the Nobel Peace Prize

The president spoke right after him, disavowing any idea of winning any such award. “I'm promoting peace between the two sides of the Strait to bring more long-term prosperity to the people of Taiwan, for peace across the Strait will yield more substantial dividends of peace and make it possible for the Chinese nation not to see any more civil war,” Ma pointed out.

After the meeting, Wang who heads the Control Yuan as president told the press he doesn't mind being called a toady. “I am just restating the opinions of many a scholar abroad,” he said. “Anybody wants to call me a toad eater, let him,” he added.

Now that U.S. President Barack Obama has been awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize, many overseas Chinese opinion leaders in the United States believe the heads of state on both sides of the Taiwan Strait may be next in line to receive the honors. It makes sense, because a detente is budding between Taiwan and China, eight years after relations across the Strait started to seriously decline while President Chen Shui-bian was in office. As a matter of fact, Beijing passed an anti-secession law in March 2005, codifying an automatic invasion of Taiwan if Chen continued to move the island toward de jure independence.

Ma certainly deserves the prize if he does more than he has done to improve relations across the Strait over the past year and a half. He had three direct links between Taiwan and China — those of flights, shipping and postal service — implemented almost immediately after he was inaugurated. He allowed Chinese tourists to visit Taiwan. He is ready to have a memorandum of understanding signed for improved financial exchanges and investment. An economic cooperation framework agreement is slated to be concluded early next year at the latest to prevent Taiwan from being marginalized in an emerging free trade zone in Asia, dominated by China. One thing Ma hasn't done and likely will have to do in order to win the peace prize is to oversee the conclusion of a peace accord between the two sides of the Strait. In the run-up to the presidential election last year, he promised to have it signed. President Hu Jintao of the People's Republic did likewise. But no dialogue has gotten underway to negotiate the agreement, which Lien Chan, as honorary chairman of the Kuomintang, promised Hu in Beijing in 2005 to sign when his party came back to power.

Peace will truly dawn across the Strait only after the pact is signed to end the Chinese Civil War that has continued off and on since Chiang Kai-shek first took military action against Mao Zedong's communist army in 1934. Chiang, defeated in the civil war, moved his KMT government from Nanjing to Taipei at the end of 1949. A Nobel Peace Prize should be conferred on Ma and Hu when they end the lingering hostilities from the civil war.

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