Contact is taking a holiday!

By Jonathan Sullivan, The Wall Street Journal, 3 May 2015

Being closely associated with Beijing has hurt Taiwan’s ruling party and caused it to lose its grip on power.

China’s Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and Taiwan’s Kuomintang Chairman Eric Chu are holding a summit meeting in Beijing on Monday, the highest-level talks between the two parties in six years. While Taiwan’s officials describe it in anodyne terms—discussing “issues of mutual concern”—simmering tensions across the Taiwan Strait make this meeting highly significant.

The two leaders will no doubt discuss their parties’ failed gamble on Taiwanese politics. The CCP and the KMT expected that by building closer economic ties they would strengthen support for the Taiwanese ruling party, which shares the mainland’s goal of eventual reunification. Instead the Taiwanese public rebelled against mainland influence in domestic politics.

In February 2014, the KMT brought cross-Strait relations to their strongest point in history. Representatives of the two governments met officially for the first time in decades.

Despite that breakthrough, the political fortunes of the KMT and President Ma Ying-jeou deteriorated dramatically. Student-led protests, dubbed the Sunflower Movement, blocked the keystone policy of Mr. Ma’s second and final term, an extension of the free-trade agreement signed with China during his first term.

Then in November the KMT suffered devastating losses in midterm elections, after which Mr. Ma stepped down as chairman of the party. His approval ratings now languish in the teens. Ordinary Taiwanese are increasingly queasy about the KMT’s close links with the CCP.

With a paucity of viable candidates, the KMT is unlikely to hold on to the presidency when elections are held in January 2016. It may even lose control of the legislature for the first time in history. Internal divisions threaten to split the party.

Beijing must now proceed along two tracks, shoring up the KMT while preparing for a new administration led by the Democratic Progressive Party. That is the true agenda of this week’s summit.

Last year Mr. Chu narrowly retained his position as mayor of Xinbei, formerly known as Taipei county and now the island’s most populous city. He is the only potential presidential candidate with sufficiently broad support in the party and in society. In public, he insists that he won’t run.

In reality, Mr. Chu is divided about running for the presidency. If he bows out, KMT losses are likely to be magnified. But he stands a far better chance of winning if he waits for 2020. And if he runs next year he will also have to explain to the people of Xinbei why he is breaking his promise to them to finish his mayoral term.

There is still time for Mr. Chu to change his mind before the May 16 nomination deadline. It is reasonable to expect that Mr. Xi will use this week’s meeting to pressure him to run and offer support to boost the KMT’s slim chances.

The Chinese side will hope such a high-profile meeting will allow Mr. Chu to showcase his credentials as a man that China is willing to work with. The talks come only a day after a KMT-CCP forum in Shanghai that always produces a number of joint recommendations and policies. Expect China to throw a few concessions Mr. Chu’s way, so he can return to Taiwan looking like a man who can get a good deal.

Mr. Xi will want to know what contingency plans the KMT has in store to contain the historically pro-independence DPP if the voters swing to the opposition. To minimize the damage to its interests, the Communist Party has already started drawing rhetorical battle lines to box in the DPP’s ability to push toward formal independence for the island.

The basis for China’s relations with Mr. Ma over the past seven years has been the “1992 consensus,” a tacit agreement that there is only one China but each side has its own interpretation of what that means. It has been a useful conceit. The Communist Party emphasizes the “one China” element, but the “separate interpretations” clause allows the KMT room to maneuver.

But in recent months China has begun to insist on the “one China” principle minus the “separate interpretations.” In effect it is moving the goalposts. That suggests if the DPP comes to power in 2016, relations across the Taiwan Strait could again become deadlocked.

Monday’s meeting will be private and we won’t know whether Mr. Chu is offered some kind of electoral help. China knows that any aid for the KMT must be low-key because of the sensitivity Taiwanese feel about external influence in their elections.

Nevertheless, the timing and opacity of this meeting will do nothing to assuage Taiwanese concerns that Beijing wants to coopt the KMT. The CCP seems to be persisting with a Taiwan policy that has not yet delivered the results it desires.