Trump Has Made a U-Turn, It’s Time Tsai Ying-wen Made a Change

  Trump Has Made a U-Turn, It’s Time Tsai Ying-wen Made a Change

China Times Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan, ROC)

April 14, 2017

 Translation of an Except

Trump has been in office as US President less than three months; his China policy has already shown a big U-turn. The outside world originally assessed that the hastily held informal Xi-Trump Summit between the chiefs of state of China and the United States would achieve limited results; in the end, not only the host and visitors were both happy, Trump made a phone call to Xi Jinping on the 12^th. After the hotline conversation, Trump publicly lauded Xi Jinping and his wife, as well as US-China relations; he retracted the accusations that China was a currency manipulator, revised his stance during the campaign that he pledged to counter China, and committed himself to promoting a scenario where the United States and China move in the direction of establishing a new big power relationship.

Comparing the relevant information revealed by the White House and Beijing, it shows that "mutual respect, managing and controling divergencies, expanding the areas of cooperation" would be the three core points for the operations of US-China relations in the future. As a result, on the North Korean dispute, China and the United States adopted a proactive attitude of cooperation in order to realize the goal of a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula. The difference lies in that the Chinese side advocated a settlement of the issues through peaceful means, while the United States would not rule out adopting other means. With regard to the US bombing of Syria under the Assad regime, the Chinese side indicated understanding; however, in consideration of its relationship with Russia, in the vote over imposing sanctions on Syria in the UN Security Council, China changed its no vote to abstention. In the dispute in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, Trump emphasized the importance of observing international norms, as well as past commitments over non-militarization, and narrated the importance of safeguarding human rights and the value system the United States believed in. However, compared with the tense relations between the US and China prior to the Xi-Trump Summit, these differences have obviously shrunk, becoming ameliorated, and have moved forward in an optimistic direction.

Some pan-Green figures made serious misjudgments of the situation, attempting to link the “rectification” of the national title, initiating authoring a new constitution; this not only does injustice to Tsai Ing-wen, it will also make the slow-moving progress in US-Japan-Taiwan relations come to a premature demise. The DPP will be in power for a year and Sino-US relations have returned to the normal track; Tsai Ying-wen should promptly resolve the cross-Strait deadlock over the 1992 Consensus, avoiding a return to the old path of confrontation. Especially, our side, up to now, has not yet received an invitation from the WHA; the Tsai government should face the reality, pragmatically readjust its Mainland policy so as to avoid misjudgment and serious damage to our interests.

The authorities across the Strait should simultaneously exhibit goodwill; the dispute over the Zhou Hongxu (周泓旭) case and Lee Ming-jer (李明哲) case which occurred recently should especially be clarified in the shortest period of time possible. It is especially proper for the Tsai government to take the initiative to release a new plan for resolving the cross-Strait deadlock so as to ensure that the two sides of the Strait will not slide into confrontation.

Attachment : none