TAIPEI, Taiwan, Nov. 6 -- Marking the highest-level contact between China and Taiwan's government in 60 years, Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou met briefly with Beijing's most senior envoy for Taiwan, Chen Yunlin, on Thursday at a government guesthouse as thousands of protesters loudly shouted anti-China slogans outside.
The historic meeting was a sign of detente in one of Asia's longest-running disputes. Military tensions have run high since 1949, when the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek lost the Chinese civil war and fled to Taiwan. Beijing has since insisted that Taiwan is a renegade province, to be brought under Chinese control by military force if necessary. It has refused to recognize the Nationalists' government, which democratically rules Taiwan. The United States, the island's main military supplier, has pledged to defend Taiwan from an unprovoked attack.
But Chen's willingness to make contact with Ma, a Nationalist, indicated that Beijing is softening its position toward Taiwan, analysts said.
"The two sides of the Taiwan Strait have their differences and challenges, especially regarding Taiwan's security and international status," Ma said Thursday during the open meeting. But he added that he hoped the two sides could resolve their differences by not denying the other's existence and by working for peace.
Chen, the most senior Chinese official to visit the island since 1949, did not say much during the short meeting, and did not address Ma as president, in a sign Beijing will still not openly acknowledge the Taiwanese government's sovereignty.
This infuriated the independence protesters outside, who were creating a din that could be heard miles away by blowing horns, banging gongs and shouting slogans. Many interpreted Ma's acceptance of Chen's treatment as surrender.
"Ma's not acting like a president, he's acting like a lackey of a Chinese emperor," said Lai Ho-an, a middle-aged man wearing a yellow ribbon around his head emblazoned with the slogan "Taiwan my country."
Groups of protesters, many of them supporters of the opposition, pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, later battled with riot police as they tried to push down barbed-wire barricades blocking streets.
The number of protesters -- many waving green flags and carrying placards with slogans such as "Communist bandit, get out of Taiwan" -- swelled in the late afternoon to 200,000, an opposition party official said. Police would not give a crowd estimate.
Hopes of a new era that accompanied the election of Ma Ying-jeou as president of Taiwan in March are being eroded by allegations his Kuomintang administration is reverting to authoritarian tactics used when it ruled the island under one-party martial law for 40 years.
At least seven senior members of the Democratic Progressive Party administration of former president Chen Shui-bian are being held under draconian "investigative detention" laws that allow prosecutors to hold suspects for up to four months without charge.
Prosecutors claim they believe the detained officials have been involved in corruption and might destroy evidence if not imprisoned.
But DPP leaders and other observers accuse the new Kuomintang administration of using the judicial system to purge the political stage of its opponents, smearing the reputations of the detained DPP officials by leaking unsupported allegations to the media, and using the detentions to try to extract confessions.
Those detained include a former senior official in Chen's office, the former interior minister Yu Cheng-hsien, former deputy prime minister Chiou I-jen, the former deputy environment minister Dr. James Lee, two DPP municipal officials and a county magistrate.
Former president Chen himself is under investigation for allegedly misusing the equivalent of just over $500,000 from a special fund and his wife, Wu Shu-jen, is on trial for the same offence.
The allegations against Ma and his Kuomintang administration have come to a head during the four-day visit to Taiwan of Chen Yunlin, the head of China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS).
Chen is the most senior envoy from Beijing to visit Taiwan since 1949 when the island became an exile haven for the Kuomintang after its defeat by the communists in China's civil war.
Chen and his Taiwanese counterpart, Chiang Pin-kung, signed a series of agreements allowing direct flights and shipping between Taiwan and China, linked postal services and regulations governing food safety.
Ma and his administration insist the agreements will help boost Taiwan's economy and will not undermine the island's sovereignty as an independent nation.
But opponents such as the new leader of the DPP, Tsai Ing-wen, say Ma and his coterie of influential senior Kuomintang officials, who were mostly born in China, have been too ready to make concessions because they are prepared to surrender the island's sovereignty to Beijing.
Those suspicious of the intentions of Ma and his influential mentors such as former Kuomintang leader Lien Chan and James Soong, both of whom have developed close ties to Beijing, have watched intensely every nuance of the visit of ARATS head Chen.
There were instant rebuttals in the media when, in preparation for the visit, Ma referred to Taiwan not as an independent state, but as a "region" and an "area."
That opposition intensified when no Taiwanese national flags were flown around the hotel where the 60-member Chinese delegation stayed and police confiscated the flags from demonstrators on the streets outside.
The heavy security around Chen's visit has fuelled concerns on Taiwan that the Kuomintang is returning to the authoritarian methods of one-party rule and martial law it was forced to abandon in the late 1980s under pressure from the public and its principal ally, the United States.
On Wednesday a coalition of human rights, judicial reform and social movement organizations accused the Kuomintang of "pulling Taiwan's human rights standards down to the level of the People's Republic of China." The organization cited suppression of protests during the Chen visit, as well as the detention of the DPP officials.
Similar criticism came from a group of 20 leading American, Canadian and Australian experts on China and Taiwan.
The group, which included Washington's former de facto ambassador to Taipei, Nat Bellocchi, said the recent acts by the Ma administration resembled "the unfair and unjust procedures practised during the dark days of martial law."
jmanthorpe@vancouversun.com
