Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen says Tiananmen crackdown highlights need to stand up to Beijing
- Tsai meets leaders of 1989 pro-democracy movement to bolster credentials for protecting island’s democracy
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met a group of exiled Tiananmen protesters on Thursday, a move that further burnishes her credentials for standing up to Beijing.
She said the bloody crackdown on the student protesters in 1989 should remind Taiwan that it must firmly reject the “one country, two systems” formula put forward by Beijing for reunification to safeguard its sovereignty, freedom and democracy.
“We don’t want to mislead the other side into making a wrong judgment nor do we want to let down those who support democracy and freedom as a result of an ambiguous answer by a Taiwanese president,” Tsai told her visitors.
“There is no room for ambiguity or dodging when the ‘one country, two systems’ proposal was raised, and we must clearly state that this is not a proposal that we, who have enjoyed freedom, democracy and human rights, could accept.”
The group of mainland émigrés included former Tiananmen student leaders such as Wang Dan, Wang Juntao, Deng Biao, Zhou Fengsuo and Fang Zheng, who were visiting Taiwan for a three-day international forum held to mark the 30th anniversary of the crackdown.
At the start of the year Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed that the two sides should start cross-strait unification talks under the one country, two systems model used to reunite Hong Kong and Macau with the mainland – a model that Tsai flatly rejected saying the two cities had no real autonomy.