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進入《TAIPEI TIMES》 Ko repeats rhetoric in Shanghai
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je, right, shakes hands with Shanghai Mayor Ying Yong yesterday at the start of this year’s Shanghai-Taipei Forum in Shanghai. Photo: CNA
By Lee I-chia / Staff reporter
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je （柯文哲） yesterday said he was committed to bolstering ties between Taiwan and China and described the two nations as a “family with a shared destiny,” in a speech at the Taipei-Shanghai Forum opening ceremony in China.
Chinese President Xi Jinping （習近平） has made similar remarks several times, including during a meeting with then-Chinese Nationalist Party （KMT） chairman Lien Chan （連戰） and then-vice president Vincent Siew （蕭萬長）, both in 2013.
Ko and a delegation of Taipei City Government officials on Saturday afternoon flew to Shanghai to attend the annual twin-city forum.
Ko began his speech by saying that “before 1987, the ‘three noes’ policy was in place between Taiwan and the mainland — no contact, no negotiation and no compromise, but in 1987 people were allowed to visit their relatives in China, which was the first step toward reconciliation between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.”
“The two sides went from being completely isolated from each other to having dialogue and exchanges, which finally provided an opportunity for ‘mutual recognition and mutual understanding,’” he said.
The past 30 years of exchanges between the two sides demonstrated two things, Ko said.
First, that a government should direct its efforts toward the needs of the public, and second, that the government should have the public’s interests in mind, he said.
“It is not impossible to resolve the animosity between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, but both sides must make efforts toward ‘mutual respect, mutual cooperation and even mutual consideration,” he said.
“Cross-strait relations are important and affect the lives of Taiwanese. If we take the public’s well-being as the main goal, uphold the idea of ‘two sides of the Strait are one family,’ strengthen exchanges and cooperation, establish ‘a community with a shared destiny’ and together pursue a bright future for the people on both sides, then the current deadlock can be overcome,” Ko said.
“This years marks the 30th anniversary of breaking the separation of the compatriots on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. The compatriots of both sides are one family; an inseparable community with a shared destiny,” Shanghai Mayor Ying Yong （應勇） said in his opening speech.
Ko responded to media inquiries about the future direction of interactions across the Taiwan Strait by comparing the relationship to a marriage.
“A married couple might say bad things about each other in an argument, but a quarrel between lovers begins at one end of the bed and is mended at the other end,” he said. “I have always stressed mutual recognition, mutual understanding, mutual respect and mutual cooperation, but now I would like to add mutual consideration. This is the basic structure of the relationship.”
Blaming the failure of a recent Taipei City Government proposal to swap jurisdiction over local and state government land on “opposition for the sake of opposition,” he said that “practical politics” could allow the public to lead better lives.
President Tsai Ing-wen’s （蔡英文） administration sees any city-to-city exchanges without political preconditions in a positive light, Presidential Office spokesman Sidney Lin （林鶴明） said.
However, “especially at this moment, when Taiwan faces difficult diplomatic challenges, our citizens deeply hope that we stay united and that their views are properly represented during such exchange activities,” he said.
Additional reporting by CNA
新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES
