Beijing’s basic policy toward Taiwan is to remain unchanged despite political changes in Taiwan, a Chinese official said on Saturday.
“No matter what changes occur in Taiwan’s political scene, the mainland’s basic policy line toward Taiwan will not change,” China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) said while meeting with a group of Taiwanese businesspeople with operations in China.
Zhang said he hoped that in the new year, cross-strait relations would continue to move forward along a path of peaceful development based on the common political foundation of the so-called “1992 consensus.”
He said that cross-strait ties have achieved fruitful results since 2008, a development which he said is beneficial to the wellbeing of people on both sides of the Strait and that should be valued.
It was the first time that Zhang has openly talked about cross-strait relations since the Jan. 16 elections in Taiwan, which saw the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) win the presidency.
Tsai and her party have rejected the existence of the “1992 consensus,” which Taiwan’s incumbent Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government interprets as a tacit understanding reached during a meeting in Hong Kong in 1992 between Taiwanese and Chinese representatives, under which both sides claim to have acknowledged that there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “one China” means.
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