Opinion | Why China and Taiwan should set their sights on 2072 for implementing an agreement on unification
- Tom Plate says instead of escalating cross-strait tension, Beijing and Taiwan should focus on coming to an agreement on the ‘1992 consensus’ and working towards a settlement in time for the end of Mao Zedong’s 100-year waiting period
I woke with a start from one of those awful dreams – something eerie about Taiwan and China, in which leaders from both sides had been screaming at each other, all the while yelling at me to shut up and stay out of it. A nightmare.
I know, most people have normal neurotic dreams in which they are hounded by wolves, unable to find their way home, or end up sobbing over a missing cat. I have those dreams too but sometimes weird psychodramas about cross-strait battles, the third world war and global destruction push the lost cat out of the psychic picture. Probably this comes with the well-mined territory of writing columns about Asia, including China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. That has got to dent one’s psyche.
Consider that a Chinese ministry of state security agent once asked me over dinner: “Do you really think the American people care enough about Taiwan to go to war over it?” I braced myself for a moment, considering the implications of the conversation.
In the course of my work, I had come to befriend this “media and cultural attaché” and grown to like him immensely. He was smart, patriotic, cosmopolitan – and he listened. I wanted to answer very carefully. My reply: “I see what you are getting at, but it would depend on our domestic politics at the time – it might especially depend on who our president was.” The official took this in with a sense of deep reflection.