President Ma told the visitors that the US, mainland China, and Taiwan all hold very similar views regarding cross-strait relations, and added that even our opposition parties hope to maintain the status quo. The president emphasized that today's "status quo" did not actually exist before he came to office, and that Taiwan-US relations suffered when his two predecessors in office described cross-strait ties first as "special state-to-state relations," which the media dubbed the "two states theory," and later as "one country on each side." The fact is, he said, "what the people of Taiwan support is today's 'status quo,' not the 'status quo' of seven years ago." In his first inaugural address seven years ago, the president pledged that his administration would work, under the framework of the ROC Constitution, to maintain the principle of "no unification, no independence, and no use of force," and that his administration, acting on the basis of the "1992 Consensus"—whereby each side acknowledges the existence of "one China" but maintains its own interpretation of what that means—would seek peaceful cross-strait relations. And during a speech at a recent June 3 videoconference with Stanford University, the president once again reiterated that his administration's conduct of cross-strait relations, under the framework of the ROC Constitution, based on the "1992 Consensus," has spurred positive developments in Taiwan-US relations.
Turning to the topic of regional peace, President Ma stated that in putting forward the East China Sea Peace Initiative in 2012, he called for shelving sovereignty disputes and jointly developing the area's resources. Then in 2013 his administration signed a fisheries agreement with Japan, thus effectively putting an end to a 40-year old bilateral fisheries dispute. In the process, he said, Taiwan did not yield an inch on sovereignty while securing big advances in fishing rights. The government here therefore hopes that its experience in pursuing peace and cooperation in the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea can be extended to the South China Sea as well. Even though Taiwan controls fewer islands than any of the other disputants in the South China Sea, he said, if all the parties focus only on sovereignty disputes while overlooking resource development, they will never make any progress at all. That is why Taiwan has put forward a neutral solution, thus getting all sides off to a good start on the path toward shared peace and prosperity.
【Source: Office of the President】