A new peace dividend is growing across the Taiwan Straits, as more business dividends multiply.

WHILE Japan makes waves over the rise of China, more significant tectonic movements making for continental realignments have been at work.

Among these major structural shifts and undercurrents are recent moves in Taiwan towards closer relations with China. In just a few years, a Taiwan Straits known as a dangerous regional flashpoint is now much cooler and relaxed, thanks to a bipartisan recognition in Taipei of the prevailing realities across the water.

In mid-2007, candidates Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang (KMT) and Frank Hsieh Chang-ting of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) confronted each other in a coming presidential election in January 2008.

Ma blasted Hsieh for duplicating then president Chen Shui-bian’s “closed-door policy” on trade with China at Taiwan’s great expense. This was in response to Hsieh’s criticism of Ma’s conciliatory line on Beijing.

So when President Ma came into office in 2008, he seemed to promise a sea of change in cross-Straits relations. He delivered as promised, with Taipei-Beijing ties growing from strength to strength.

Since then, gone are the days of Chen’s prickly relations with the mainland over intimations to independence, and all else with pretensions to that. And the reversal has been nothing short of dramatic.

Ma’s presidency and the changes he wrought, now in the second term, have been about more than just a Kuomintang (KMT) government replacing a DPP administration. Ma also had the personal chemistry to work, and work better, with today’s Beijing.

To offset fears in Taiwan that he might go too far or too fast in building bridges across the Straits, Ma advocated the “three nos” under his presidency: no negotiations with China over reunification, no declaration of independence by Taiwan, and no use of force in effecting anything of the kind.

This was his response to China’s three nos: no declaration of independence by Taiwan, no “two Chinas,” and no role for Taiwan as a nation state in international institutions. This trio of negatives was itself a response to former (1980s) Taiwan president Chiang Ching-kuo’s three nos of no contact, no compromise and no negotiations with Beijing.

The way the different sets of negatives have evolved indicates how cross-Straits relations themselves have developed. It has generally moved from robust defiance through rigid exclusion to realistic deal-making.

Still, Ma is not without his critics who caricature him as some kind of apologist or appeaser for Beijing. That kind of typecasting fails to understand not only Ma and his modernist agenda for Taiwan, but also the enormous subterranean forces at work beneath the Straits itself.

These forces are invariably economic, continually and cumulatively reshaping political and diplomatic ties at the surface. An in-depth observation of the course of cross-Straits relations, alongside the thrust of Ma’s policies in the context of Taiwan’s fortunes, will leave no doubt about that.

This is the essence of Taipei’s Economic Co-operation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China. Despite previous Taiwanese administrations’ wooing of some two dozen (small, economically subservient) countries for diplomatic recognition, Ma understands that any pretensions of competing with Beijing globally for “China” recognition is well past.

His re-election earlier this year confirmed it. Ma’s critics singularly fail to understand that it is not so much Ma making or remaking ties with Beijing, but Taiwan’s growing economic ties with the mainland that created the conditions for Ma’s more realistic presidency in the first place.

Evidence of this comes with the position of DPP leaders, and notably Hsieh himself, on cross-Straits relations. In July this year, the party re-opened its Department of China Affairs after its electoral defeat in January, followed by visits of party officials to Yunnan and Shanghai.

Then last week, as former president Chen sat in a Taipei jail over a corruption conviction, former prime minister and DPP chairman Frank Hsieh travelled to Beijing in the most high-profile visit by a DPP leader yet.

Officially, Hsieh’s five-day trip was appropriately non-official, being a personal trip in his capacity as chairman of the Taiwan Reform Foundation. He himself said he crossed the Straits “to attend an international bartending competition.”

On arrival on the mainland, Hsieh headed for his ancestral home of Xiamen in Fujian Province. He was warmly welcomed everywhere he went, as supporters of his trip toasted his effort as “breaking the ice” in DPP-Beijing ties.

Along the way he met and chatted with mainland officials in charge of cross-Straits relations, but to Hsieh this was incidental or coincidental. It was not part of the bartending competition itinerary, he said.

Back in Taiwan, Hsieh’s trip was welcomed by some of his closest party colleagues but not all. DPP chairman Su Tseng-chang praised Hsieh’s confidence, while his immediate predecessor Tsai Ing-wen who lost the presidential race to Ma complimented Hsieh on his boldness.

Other colleagues, however, have been more reserved. They, like those parts of Taiwan still to reconcile themselves with the economically defining realities across the Straits, still need more time to be persuaded.

Hsieh has been described as “upbeat” about a trip he himself called “trailblazing”. In high spirits during and after his trip, he declared on the mainland that “It is never too late to do the right thing.”

An assurance he gave to his more conservative party colleagues was telling: he said Taiwan would not “disappear” just by having closer ties with Beijing, but might well disappear if it “failed to improve and our economy collapses.”

In a statement on Oct 4, the day Hsieh arrived in China, the Taipei Veterans General Hospital where the prisoner Chen had been warded said he was suffering from severe depression. It added that an MRI test on his brain found that he was also suffering hypertension, prostatitis and psychiatric disease, among other things.

The statement said Chen, whose career highlight had been attempts to declare independence from China, would soon be transferred to another hospital for psychotherapy and other medical treatment.

Meanwhile, the KMT, suffering one lacklustre presidential term after another because of mediocre economic performance, has been pushed onto the defensive. A DPP that just lost to it in January is now turning up the heat and the pressure on Ma’s KMT by warming to Beijing as an alternative and equally viable partner.

Dwindling exports, weak domestic consumption, bureaucratic inertia and unimaginative policies have, for the KMT, combined with a lack of vision, intra-party bickering and a complacency that regards the ECFA as a panacea lying at the core of Ma’s and Taiwan’s economic woes.

These have added considerably to, but not created, the bipartisan realisation that Taiwan’s future prospects are inseparable from closer ties with China. DPP leaders like Hsieh who “get it” are visibly racing to convert the KMT deficits into DPP pluses.

However, since the latest election was only this year, Hsieh’s visit to the mainland cannot be for cynical, immediate electoral purposes. Instead it has every indication of being the real deal: a clear expression of senior DPP acceptance that Taiwan’s future lies on the road that passes through Beijing.

The implications are that, regardless of political ideology or party affiliation, Taiwan politicians either develop a conciliatory attitude to Beiijing or they ought to have their heads examined.

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