Taiwan's steps away from mainland will harm both

Taiwan's main opposition Democratic Progressive Party, DPP, Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen speaks during a press conference in Taipei, Taiwan, April 15, 2015. [Photo/IC]

How far will Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen go in her endeavors to estrange the island from the mainland? No one seems to be able to tell from what she has said. But everyone can see where her government is trying to lead the island when it comes to relations across the Taiwan Straits.

What has happened since she took over the leadership of the island points to what her refusal to clarify her attitude on the 1992 Consensus portends－trying to do as much as she and her administration can toward a de facto "Taiwan independence".

When 24 tourists from the mainland were killed in a bus fire in Taiwan on July 19, Tsai as leader of the island, which has benefitted greatly from a large number of tourists from across the Straits, did not say a word about the perished tourists. Instead, she said elegiac words about the Taiwan tourist guide who was also killed in the tragedy.

On the question of Taiping Island, which the arbitral tribunal in The Hague absurdly ruled in July as not being an island but rocks, and on the disputes with Japan over fishing rights at Okinotorishima atoll, Tsai's ambiguity and prevarication not only betrays her true intention. It also points to her hidden motives to pursue her own political ambition at the cost of the interests of people on both sides of the Straits.

In the latest move, the "National Museum of History" in Taipei announced last Tuesday that visitors from the mainland would not be allowed to use the documents and archives there. There is no telling whether Tsai and her government are behind the decision. But it is natural for people on the mainland to consider it as a sign of unfriendliness.

Despite her prevarication on stating her stance toward the 1992 Consensus, it has become increasingly clear that her endeavor is to lead the island away from the motherland. She does not dare to talk about her pro-independence stance because she knows what she and her administration are trying to do about relations with the Chinese mainland is not in the interests of the island and its people.

She also knows that the majority of people across the Straits will not accept her.

Yet the dream of making "Taiwan independence" a fait accompli will never come true since it is not difficult for people to tell what Tsai's administration is attempting to do.