HONG KONG — For the past eight years, the Chinese government has showered its former enemies in Taiwan with economic gifts: direct flights, commercial deals, even an undersea water pipeline. Trade is up more than 50 percent, and mainland tourists, once barred from traveling to the island, now arrive in droves, nearly four million last year alone.
But Beijing has discovered, again, that money can’t buy love.
In Taiwan last year, large protests broke out against an agreement to expand trade with the mainland, and the governing Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, which favors closer ties with China, has plummeted in popularity and is widely expected to lose the presidency and possibly the legislature in January elections.
Now, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has agreed to meet the president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou — the first meeting between the leader of the Republic of China, the government that fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war in 1949, and the leader of the People’s Republic of China, established on the mainland by Mao’s victorious Communists.
The historic encounter, scheduled to take place on neutral ground in the city-state of Singapore on Saturday, will be trumpeted by both sides as a milestone in cross-strait relations. But it also seems to be an implicit acknowledgment by Mr. Xi that the Chinese effort to woo Taiwan with economic benefits alone has been unsuccessful — and that Beijing’s dream of unification with the island is as distant as ever, despite a long courtship.
“Xi Jinping is at a loss,” said Parris Chang, president of the Taiwan Institute for Political, Economic and Strategic Studies, a think tank in Taipei. “He doesn’t know what to do.”
Jonathan Sullivan, an associate professor at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham, described the decision to meet Mr. Ma as “a Hail Mary pass with time expiring.”
“Beijing has finally realized that the partner it has been working with on Taiwan, the K.M.T., is heading for disaster,” Professor Sullivan said, referring to the Kuomintang by its initials.
Mr. Xi is breaking with long-established policy by agreeing to meet Mr. Ma. But it is unclear how much further the Communist leadership is able or willing to go to win over the 23 million people of Taiwan, who polls show are uninterested in unification and increasingly anxious about the self-governing island’s dependence on the much larger Chinese economy.
Tsai Ing-wen, the leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, is widely favored to become Taiwan’s new president. So far, she has not been subjected to the sort of vitriol that the Communist Party has heaped on some of the D.P.P.’s past candidates, an indication that Beijing may be receptive to working with her.
Yet there has been no hint that China is capable of taking steps that might improve its public standing in Taiwan, by allowing the island greater representation in the United Nations or other international organizations, for example, or signaling a willingness to treat it as an equal in a future political union.
In many ways, the Communist Party’s approach to Taiwan has mirrored its policies in volatile Chinese territories like Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang, where it opens its checkbook to distribute economic benefits but refuses to compromise on political matters.
But Taiwan is different — beyond Beijing’s rule — and the problem that China faces there is an example of the limits of its heavy reliance on trade and investment to project influence overseas. Even as it has assumed the role of a global power, its one-note focus on economic relations has sometimes backfired, with resentment against Chinese investment simmering from Southeast Asia to Africa.
Since his election in 2008, Mr. Ma has made more than 20 deals to expand commerce and interaction with mainland China. But student-led demonstrators occupied Taiwan’s legislature for nearly a month last year to block passage of a new trade bill that he championed, a protest that became known as the Sunflower Movement and that unnerved Beijing.
The lesson for the Chinese leadership was that “the usual influence of the mainland — more money, more investment — has less impact,” said a senior Asian diplomat following cross-strait relations, who requested anonymity to speak freely about a subject the Chinese consider sensitive.
Joseph Wu, secretary general of the D.P.P., said the meeting scheduled for Saturday represented a shift by Beijing but was also a “double-edged sword.”
“China is trying to woo Taiwan,” he said. “However, I think the resentment among regular people for China is quite deep. People’s dislike of President Ma is also deep. For those two to get together in Singapore may not change people’s minds.”
Part of the problem in Taiwan has been slow growth; gross domestic product contracted in the last quarter, despite all the Chinese tourism and trade. Many are worried that investment in China has undermined Taiwan’s own industries. And even when the island’s economy performed better, wage growth stagnated, with the benefits of cross-strait trade going disproportionately to Taiwan’s business elite.
The larger concern, though, has been China’s intentions. Beijing considers Taiwan to be Chinese territory that must be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary, and the demonstrations against Mr. Ma’s policies have been driven by fear that China is using trade to achieve what decades of military bluster could not.
Both sides have said Saturday’s meeting is meant to consolidate peaceful relations and ensure future prosperity. “This meeting is positive, for Taiwan, for the mainland, for the world,” Mr. Ma said in a news conference on Thursday.
But many in Taiwan view the meeting as an attempt to influence the vote in January. Beijing has tried before to dampen popular support for independence-leaning politicians in Taiwan. It lobbed missiles into waters near the island ahead of the 1996 election. And it lavished attention on the Kuomintang to undercut the former president, Chen Shui-bian, whose moves to formalize Taiwan’s separate status from China angered Beijing and, at times, Washington.
“China has always tried to use different methods to influence Taiwan,” said Lin Fei-fan, one of the leaders of the Sunflower Movement. “Most people in Taiwan understand why they want to meet now,” he added.
Given that the Kuomintang’s candidate, Eric Chu, is trailing Ms. Tsai in the polls, the Chinese government sees a meeting with Mr. Ma as a chance to shake up the race, said Li Jiaquan, a retired Taiwan researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “We chose the timing because the situation for K.M.T. is critical right now,” he said.
“The meeting is to inspire the routed K.M.T.,” he added, “and on the other hand, suppress the charge of the D.P.P.”
But Mr. Li acknowledged the gambit had little chance of success with an electorate in Taiwan that has soured on closer ties with the mainland. “I can’t say it would really work, but we need to do something to humble the D.P.P.,” he said.
Many analysts in Taiwan predict the meeting will only hurt the K.M.T. further. Ms. Tsai has already gone after Mr. Ma on the issue, denouncing his surprise announcement of the meeting and warning him against making concessions that could undermine Taiwan’s status.
“The way to win an election in Taiwan is to be the less dangerous of the two options,” said Nathan F. Batto, a political scientist at Academia Sinica in Taipei. The D.P.P. was voted out of power after Mr. Chen’s efforts to assert Taiwan’s sovereignty and rile China, he noted. “But over the past four years, I think Ma Ying-jeou defined himself as the more dangerous option. He engaged China too eagerly.”
Others said the criticism of Mr. Ma overlooked how his policies had drastically reduced tensions and the potential for armed conflict between China and Taiwan. “He deserves more credit than he gets,” said Kai-Fu Lee, a prominent tech investor from Taiwan and former head of Google in China.
The New York Times
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