Taipei's Refusal of One-China Principle Sabotages Talks

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, February 27, 2003

Taipei's Refusal of One-China Principle Sabotages Talks

Spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office under the State Council, Zhang Mingqing has repeated that China will not promise to abandon the use of force against independence movements and splitting forces in Taiwan.The Taiwan authorities are responsible for unstable cross-strait relations, because they haven't made any efforts to put an end to the independence movements and splitting forces on the island.

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Beijing Wednesday ruled out the possibility of resuming semi-official talks across the Taiwan Straits due to Taipei's refusal to accept the one-China principle.

Zhang Mingqing, spokesman with the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said no contact has been planned so far this year between top envoys from the mainland's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) and the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) on the island.

He made the remarks at a regular press conference when asked to comment on earlier Taiwanese media reports that ARATS Chairman Wang Daohan might meet his Taiwanese counterpart, Koo Chen-fu, at a Singaporean event in April.

Wang and Koo, SEF president, were expected to meet for the first time in five years while attending the event organized by the East Asia Institute of the National University of Singapore to mark the 10th anniversary of their first talks.

Zhang, however, said Wang has decided against attending the commemorative event, dashing the hope of a meeting between the two envoys.

"As far as we know, Chairman Wang does not have any plan to go to Singapore (to attend the event),'' Zhang said.

Wang and Koo held their first meeting in Singapore 10 years ago, a rare high-level contact that signalled a major progress in cross-Straits relations.

They last met in 1998 when Koo visited Beijing and Shanghai.

But the talks were broken off in 1999 after former Taiwan leader Lee Teng-hui introduced his notorious "two states'' theory on July 9, 1999, which defines cross-Straits relations as a state-to-state relationship.

Wang's planned visit to the island was also cancelled.

Established on December 16, 1991, the ARATS engaged in talks with its Taiwan counterpart SEF in the absence of official links between Beijing and Taipei.

Zhang stressed the mainland has the utmost sincerity and kindness in restarting cross-Straits dialogue on the basis of the one-China principle and 1992 consensus.

The one-China principle holds there is only one China in the world, both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan are part of China and the Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity brook no separation.

Under the 1992 consensus, an informal agreement reached orally between ARATS and SEF in November 1992, the two sides of the Straits both adhere to the one-China principle.

"The contact and negotiations between ARATS and SEF can be jump-started at once as long as the Taiwan authorities explicitly embrace the one-China principle and 1992 consensus,'' the spokesman said.

He blamed the long-stalled cross-Straits ties on Taipei's destruction of the political basis for resuming bilateral talks.

Taiwan leader Chen Shui-bian from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) refused to accept the one-China principle and denied the existence of 1992 consensus after he took power in May last year.

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