China Tries to Co-op Taiwan with economic incentives.

Austin Ramzy writes:  For the past eight years, the Chinese government has showered its former enemies in Taiwan with economic gifts: direct flights, commercial deals, even an undersea water pipeline. Trade is up more than 50 percent, and mainland tourists, once barred from traveling to the island, now arrive in droves, nearly four million last year alone.

In Taiwan last year, large protests broke out against an agreement to expand trade with the mainland, and the governing Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, which favors closer ties with China, has plummeted in popularity and is widely expected to lose the presidency and possibly the legislature in January elections.

Now, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has agreed to meet the president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou — the first meeting between the leader of the Republic of China, the government that fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war in 1949, and the leader of the People’s Republic of China, established on the mainland by Mao’s victorious Communists.

The encounter, scheduled to take place on neutral ground in Singapore on Saturday, will be trumpeted by both sides as a milestone in cross-strait relations. But it also seems to be an implicit acknowledgment by Mr. Xi that the Chinese effort to woo Taiwan with economic benefits alone has been unsuccessful — and that Beijing’s dream of unification with the island is as distant as ever, despite a long courtship.

“Xi Jinping is at a loss,” said Parris Chang, president of the Taiwan Institute for Political, Economic and Strategic Studies, a think tank in Taipei. “He doesn’t know what to do.”

Jonathan Sullivan, an associate professor at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham, described the decision to meet Mr. Ma as “a Hail Mary pass with time expiring.”

“Beijing has finally realized that the partner it has been working with on Taiwan, the K.M.T., is heading for disaster,” Professor Sullivan said, referring to the Kuomintang by its initials.

Mr. Xi is breaking with long-established policy by agreeing to meet Mr. Ma. But it is unclear how much further the Communist leadership is able or willing to go to win over the 23 million people of Taiwan, who polls show are uninterested in unification and increasingly anxious about the self-governing island’s dependence on the much larger Chinese economy.

Tsai Ing-wen, the leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, is widely favored to become Taiwan’s new president. So far, she has not been subjected to the sort of vitriol that the Communist Party has heaped on some of the D.P.P.’s past candidates, an indication that Beijing may be receptive to working with her.  Can China Buy a Relationship with Taiwan

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