Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator-at-large Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) on Friday said that if elected president, he would launch negotiations between the government and opposition parties to coin a new term to replace the so-called “1992 consensus.”
“People in the KMT and those in the pan-blue and pan-green camps are in disagreement over the term’s definition,” Wang said.
“The DPP [Democratic Progressive Party] claims that it is synonymous with ‘one country, two systems,’ which is likely not convincing,” he said.
Photo: Wu Chun-feng, Taipei Times
The KMT and China each have their own interpretation of the term, with some KMT members advocating “one China, different interpretations” and Beijing touting “one China, same interpretation.”
“Any definition that involves ‘interpretation’ is not the answer,” said Wang, who announced his bid to run for president in March.
With the term sparking divisions domestically and across the Taiwan Strait, he would hold negotiations between the ruling party and opposition parties to discuss whether to replace the “consensus” with a new term, while leaving open the option to “keep using it,” he said.
Meanwhile, former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and former New Taipei City mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) said that “one China” could only mean the Republic of China (ROC).
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘), another KMT presidential hopeful, during an interview with CommonWealth Magazine said that he would never only say “1992 consensus,” but rather “1992 consensus and ‘one China, different interpretations.’”
“For the Zhonghua minzu [ethnic Chinese, 中華民族], there is one ROC and one People’s Republic of China,” Gou said.
Ma said that he took Gou to mean that the “one China” in “one China, different interpretations” refers to the ROC.
Chu, who in December last year announced that he would join the KMT’s presidential primary, urged all KMT members to heed the “consensus” as defined in the party’s “peace platform” as well as its “historical context.”
It is the KMT’s unwavering stance that “one China” refers to the ROC, he said.
Commenting on Gou’s remarks, National Taiwan Normal University professor of political science Fan Shih-ping (范世平) said that Gou’s latest cross-strait stance was not different from that espoused in the DPP’s Resolution on Taiwan’s Future or the “special state-to-state relationship” theory of former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝).
China’s silence on Gou’s remarks could mean one of two things, he said.
One, it has been too preoccupied to respond, Fan said.
Two — which would be “alarming” — Gou has gained Beijing’s consent before making the remark, which would mean that the two sides had conspired together to formulate a plot to win the support of swing voters or borderline DPP supporters, he said.
The “1992 consensus — ” a term former Mainland Affairs Council chairman Su Chi (蘇起) in 2006 admitted that he made up in 2000 — refers to a tacit understanding between the KMT and the Chinese government that there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “China” means.
Additional reporting by Hsiao Fang-chi
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