The Taipei Representative Office in Hungary, in collaboration with the Central European University in Budapest, organized a workshop on the Taiwan–mainland China relationship held on November 19 at the CEU Auditorium.
Titled “Change, continuity, and challenges across the Taiwan Strait,” the workshop was opened by Dr. Kwei-bo Huang, secretary-general of the Association of Foreign Relations in Taipei, with a comprehensive talk on the art of negotiation between Beijing and Taipei. Huang, who was on-hand to witness the meeting between ROC President Ma Ying-jeou and his mainland Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Singapore on November 7, laid out the careful give-and-take in the history of Taiwan-mainland China negotiations.
“Dignity and equality” are the basis for negotiation for Taiwan, said Huang, while political ambiguity enables the two sides to develop their relations.
Commenting on the Ma-Xi meeting, Huang pointed out that it was more symbolic than substantial. The meeting will not change any international political or strategic configurations in the Asia-Pacific, he said. However, Beijing intended for the meeting to set a framework for future leaders in Taiwan to broach cross-strait relations, Huang added.
In terms of how the media in Taiwan and mainland China reported on the event, Gergely Salát of Budapest’s Pázmány Peter Catholic University stressed that in Taiwan, as in most democracies, the press usually has a strong position depending on which side they identify with. Therefore it was no surprise that newspapers that are more pro-Taiwan independence criticized Ma, while the more pro-government media used all sorts of glowing terms to describe the meeting.
In China, however, the state television CCTV cut out Ma’s speech and in the newspapers, Salát said, it failed to mention Taiwan’s upcoming presidential elections, and Chinese media blocked any words that might denote the concepts of freedom and democracy.
Other panelists included Pei-shan Kao, assistant professor with the Department of Border Policy at Taiwan’s Central Policy University; Daniel Large, associate professor at Central European University’s School of Public Policy; Ákos Kopper, head of the Department of European Studies at Eötvös Loránd University; and Tamás Novák, associate professor at Budapest Business School’s College of International Business and Management. Their topics, respectively, were the impact of China’s regional economic integration on Taiwan, cross-strait relations after the Ma-Xi handshake, the clashing logics of democracy and diplomacy, and the implications of China’s economic slowdown for Taiwan and its international relations.
