CHINA ended 18 days of menacing war games and Taiwan offered reconciliation in twin moves yesterday that raised hopes across the tense Taiwan Strait said it had ended manoeuvres in the northern part of the strait. Its exercises, which started on March 8th with missile tests, were aimed at turning voters against President Lee Tenghui of Taiwan.
However, voter surveys suggested that the Chinese war games boosted support for Mr Lee, who scored a resounding victory in Taiwan's presidential poll on Saturday to become the first directly elected president in 5,000 years of Chinese history.
Yesterday China did not announce any future war exercises reducing the chances of a confrontation with the US warships ordered into waters off Taiwan when the exercises began.
Mr Kao Koong-lian of the Taiwan cabinet's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), called on China to use this moment to embrace peaceful methods of developing bilateral relations. "We hope they can move toward the positive side and use peace to develop the cross straits relations," Mr Kao said.
In an unexpected overture, a top Taiwan official said China's cherished dream of reunification could be achieved in just four years so long as Beijing agreed to hold democratic presidential elections. "We want to tell the Communist Party that China will reunify very soon. Four years from now we can reunify," the Provincial Governor, Mr James Soong, said.
"As long as China can make up its mind four years from now to elect the president of all China with all the Chinese in Taiwan that will be the time of the real reunification of China," he told a rally in southern Taiwan.
Mr Soong, a close ally of Mr Lee, was reiterating Taipei's long held tenet that China split after the Nationalists lost the civil war in 1949 to the communists and fled to Taiwan can reunify only under a democratic system. But it was the first time a date had been officially mooted.
Beijing has made it clear since it crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 that it does not see Western style democracy as an option.
Yesterday China did an about face on Mr Lee, with state media avoiding the vitriol showered on him in recent weeks and saying his election showed Taiwan wanted closer ties with the mainland.
China's actions toward Taiwan were not a bid to obstruct democracy there, the Foreign Minister, Mr Qian Qichen, told the UN Secretary General, Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali, who is visiting Beijing. Some people on the island of Taiwan say we are obstructing their engaging in democracy, Mr Qian said. This kind of remark is completely without foundation.
"What we are opposed to is the forces conducting splittism and Taiwan independence," Mr Qian said.
The US carriers Nimitz and Independence, escorted by battle groups, were meanwhile still thought to be in seas around Taiwan, and US China relations have yet to show signs of a recovery.
The war games appear to have succeeded in focusing Taiwanese on the reunification issue, with a Taipei newspaper survey showing 29.1 per cent of 816 respondents saying stabilised relations with China should be Mr Lee's priority policy. Only 8.2 per cent said expanding Taiwan's global role should take primacy.