Business across the Taiwan Strait has grown steadily for two decades and is set to surge following a landmark 2010 trade accord. Taiwan’s sense of separateness, however, also has grown.
Between 1992 and 2011, according to surveys by the Election Study Center, the proportion of people describing themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese soared from 17 percent to 54 percent. The share identifying themselves as Chinese, meanwhile, plunged from 25 percent to 4 percent.
“The growth of Taiwanese identity is very, very significant” and “makes it more and more difficult for Ma to maneuver vis-a-vis China,” said Bruce Jacobs, an expert on Taiwan at Australia’s Monash University. Having quietly backed Ma during the election campaign, Beijing is “now expecting a payoff, but Ma is really constrained,” Jacobs said.
When Jacobs first came to Taiwan in 1965, the island was under martial law, talk of a separate identity for Taiwan was taboo and the Kuomintang was dominated by refugees from China yearning for their homeland. Now, he said, even the “KMT is overwhelmingly Taiwanese” and any bid by Ma to reach a political deal with Beijing “would be stopped cold in his own party.”
Although China is still prone to rhetoric about the “sacred mission” to unify the “motherland” and the occasional menacing propaganda blast from the military, it has dropped a push from the 1990s for unification and shifted its focus under party leader Hu Jintao to preventing Taiwan’s independence.
Beijing applauds vote
China’s official Xinhua News Agency on Sunday welcomed Ma’s victory and said it “may open new chances.” But it acknowledged that the “situation in the island is still complicated” and that “there are still some long-term disputes and divergences existing between the two sides.” The issue of independence, it added, “will continue to haunt the cross-strait relations development.”
As the presidential campaign reached its climax last week, Ma, who was born in then-British-ruled Hong Kong to parents who had fled China’s 1949 communist takeover, scoffed at warnings by his opponents that he might rush to Beijing for a political deal.
“If I win this election, I will not be visiting China,” he said.
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