The death of Wang Daohan , 90, last weekend and Koo Chen-fu, 88, in January, marked the end of an era for relations across the Taiwan Strait. The warm atmosphere between the mainland and Taiwan that the duo helped engineer in the early 1990s was all the more valuable in the light of soured relations in recent years.
Wang was president of the mainland's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, while Koo headed the Straits Exchange Foundation in Taiwan. The two bodies were formed by the mainland and Taiwanese governments to circumvent the latter's policy of no official contact with the former. Under their auspices, the so-called '1992 consensus' was developed. It was a tacit agreement between the two sides that there was only one China, but that each would maintain its own interpretation of the term 'China'. Until then, each side had insisted that it was the sole legitimate government of the whole nation.
The consensus provided the basis on which the two sides were able to put aside their political differences to formulate technical solutions to a range of practical issues that helped cross-strait communication. It was fuzzy politics at its best, and something that only the two esteemed septuagenarians could have accomplished in a spirit of mutual accommodation and respect.
Both had lived through a tumultuous period of Chinese history, in which the nation was torn by internal strife among warlords in the 1920s and 1930s, the Sino-Japanese war from 1937 to 1945 and then the civil war between the communists and nationalists, which ended in 1949 with the country split. It was also a period that saw Taiwan go through Japanese colonial rule and then an unhappy reunification with the mainland.
Both men witnessed the pain and sorrow suffered by families split apart when the communists seized control of the mainland and the nationalists retreated to Taiwan. Only they could have the stature and wit to command the respect of their respective governments and peoples to reach a pragmatic deal to ameliorate that pain and sorrow.
Because of domestic political changes in Taiwan since the late 1990s, the foundation for cross-strait reconciliation that the duo helped build has not been allowed to blossom as well as it could have. Neither former Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui or incumbent Chen Shui-bian has been keen to improve relations with the mainland. There were even times when gung-ho rhetoric from both sides sounded as if war was imminent.
