Taiwan welcomes China response to 'truce'

In his live telecast address in Beijing yesterday, the Chinese leader said China would be willing to work with Taiwan to step up cooperation in the fields of international affairs, economy, military, and culture.

Hu said Beijing will also seek to prevent unnecessary “internal attritions,” including getting Taiwan admitted into international organizations.

He said the issue of Taiwan's involvement in international organizations could be reasonably arranged through pragmatic consultations and negotiations under the conditions of not causing “two China” or “one China and one Taiwan.”

Francisco H.L. Ou, minister of foreign affairs, interpreted Hu's talk as a positive response to President Ma's call for both sides to declare “diplomatic truce.”

But Ou also said there is nothing new in Hu's repetition about the “one China” principle.

The current consensus between Taipei and Beijing is the “1992 consensus” that lets “Beijing to talk about the People's Republic of China and this side to talk about the Republic of China,” Ou said.

He also emphasized that “diplomatic truce” will mean that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will have nothing to do.

He explained that the ministry will only have more significant tasks in view of the much wider diplomatic arena if the two sides stop wasting valuable resources on meaningless diplomatic dogfights.

Officials at the Ministry of National Defense said the current and former defense ministers have all put establishing a mutual-trust military mechanism across the Taiwan Strait on priority list for regional peace.

Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung of the ruling Kuomintang said he is glad to see Hu's promise to establish a military mechanism with reciprocal trust.

Wu, who personally met Hu in Beijing a couple months earlier, expressed hope that the two sides will achieve concrete results on this regard.

Kao Koong-lian, vice chairman of the Taipei-based Straits Exchange Foundation, said the “one China” principle has always been an issue with extensive controversies.

He said the two sides should now focus on the pragmatic issues based on the newly built mutual trust instead of being stalled by the controversies again.

Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party criticized Hu's remarks calling for the DPP to abandon the Taiwan independent movement as contradicting the principle of democracy.

Tsai that the key essences of a democratic society include the freedoms of thought and campaigning on certain political ideals.

It is undemocratic for a party to ask another party to give up certain political campaigns as a precondition for talks, she explained.

The DPP also issued a statement stressing that the major cross-strait problem does not lie in the campaigns pushed by the DPP but in the people's feelings about China's military intimidation and oppressing Taiwan's diplomatic endeavors.

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