Word: china
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the exiled tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, last visited Taiwan eight years ago, Beijing went ballistic. To China's leaders, the Dalai Lama is Public Enemy No. 1 for, they claim, fomenting Tibetan separatism. Until very recently, the Beijing view of Taiwan was just as jaundiced and one-dimensional: a renegade province led and populated by disloyal subjects bent on denying China's Party-given right to rule them. Put the two together and you have the mainland's worst "splittist" nightmare. As the Dalai Lama sat down with all the island's then top political figures, Beijing...
...What changed? First, Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou eschewed the breakaway bluster of his predecessor Chen Shui-bian and, amid the global recession, hitched Taiwan's economic future to China's growth engine. In just the 15 months Ma has been in office, Taiwan and China have launched a raft of trade, investment, transport and cultural initiatives and exchanges that are inexorably binding the two together. As much as it will ever trust any Taiwan leader, Beijing sees Ma as a pragmatic politician with whom it can do business. (Read "Building Bridges to China...
...genuinely transformative factor is that China now gets Taiwan. The island is a more complex place for Beijing to decipher than Hong Kong and Macau, former British and Portuguese colonies whose governments could make no moral argument against the return of the two territories to Chinese sovereignty. Taiwan is different. Since 1987, when the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) lifted martial law, the island has gradually become a thriving, if somewhat rambunctious, democracy. Its 23 million people determine its future, not Beijing or London or Lisbon. A sizeable portion of the population - some estimates put it at as high as a third...
...growing numbers of tourists, scholars, journalists, businesspeople and even senior officials crossing the Strait in both directions have enabled China to better understand what makes Taiwan tick. Now Beijing's strategy is more nuanced. That's partly tactical: the hard-line approach was driving people to the DPP. But it's also an effort to win Taiwan hearts and minds and to show that China, too, is more complex than a caricature of a totalitarian state...
...invited him to Taiwan in order to put Ma in a spot - he'd be damned by his own people as a mainland lackey if he did not okay the visit and condemned by Beijing if he did. Ma took a gamble: he approved the trip - and bet on China's leaders appreciating his dilemma. They did. Their censure was directed solely at the DPP, with no mention of Ma whatsoever. Far from harming cross-strait relations, the Dalai Lama's visit revealed how mature those relations have become...