Ma, who is currently on a 12-day visit to the U.S., said in an interview on CNN that the one China policy is the cornerstone of U.S.-China relations.
Challenging the policy it will result in serious consequences and will affect U.S.-China relations in a major way, he said in the interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
Furthermore, Taiwan will not benefit from such a development, Ma said in the six-minute segment that aired Friday, focusing mainly on the state of the triangular Taiwan-China-U.S. relations since early December when Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) made a congratulatory call to then U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.
In the interview, Ma said many people in Taiwan were excited at first about the call but the excitment was soon replaced by misgivings that Taiwan would become a bargaining chip in Trump’s negotiations with China.
China strongly protested against the call between Tsai and Trump, which broke decades of diplomatic protocol of no contact between leaders of the U.S. and Taiwan since 1979 when the U.S. switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
Meanwhile, in another interview in the U.S., Ma told the Chinese-language World Journal that while President Tsai advocates “maintaining the status quo” across the Taiwan Strait, she does not recognize the “1992 consensus.”
The “1992 consensus” is a tacit agreement that the Kuomintang said was reached with China in 1992 that there is only one China, with each side free to interpret what that means.
However, Ma said the status quo across the Taiwan Strait has changed since Tsai took office in May 2016 and he forecast that cross-strait relations will continue to deteriorate.
He also said there is no need for Taiwan to move toward independence and any such attempt would fail. Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party would not dare put the question of Taiwan independence to a national referendum, Ma said.
However, under the right conditions, Taiwan and China can “certainly discuss unification,” he said.
The conditions would have to be to peace, democracy and acceptance by the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, he added.
