Want China Times
Date: 2015-04-21
By: Chen Sung-shan
When Tsai Ing-wen, the leader of Taiwan’s main opposition Democratic Progressive Party, was
Tsai Ing-wen gives an address at Cheng Kung University in Tainan, April 18. (Photo/CNA)
formally nominated as the party’s candidate for next year’s presidential election, she did not address the 1992 Consensus or the “one China” issue in her remarks on cross-strait relations.
Tsai said however that she would “go beyond the framework of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China,” and “establish regular cross-strait relations,” indirectly dismissing the 1992 Consensus as the basis for cross-strait exchanges.
Just as in Tsai’s presidential campaign four years ago, her political positions and discourse have left observers in a fog. Her basic tone is to “maintain the status quo,” but she left room for “unlimited” political imagination. The stronger her opposition is, the more she will move toward the center, but if the other side is weak she will not move at all.
Tsai lost her bid for the presidency in 2012 but she has a much greater chance of winning this time with the KMT demoralized in the wake of a crushing defeat in local elections in November. So she has to come up with more substance on cross-strait policy to reassure the United States and China on how she can achieve stable cross-strait relations. [FULL STORY]
