Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou began historic summit in Singapore with a minute-long handshake – and agree to split the bill for dinner

The leaders of China and Taiwan met for the first time in almost seven decades on Saturday as Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou began a historic summit in Singapore with a minute-long handshake. “Nothing can separate us,” Xi told his Taiwanese counterpart in brief public remarks following the handshake. “We are one family … We are brothers who are still connected by our flesh even if our bones are broken.

Ma told Xi both sides had been working “to replace conflict with dialogue ... We follow different political systems, but we have developed military and economic cooperation,” he said.

The meeting between Communist party chief Xi and Nationalist president Ma was the first time two such leaders had come together since Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The last encounter between communist and nationalist leaders came in August 1945, when Mao and Chiang Kai-shek came together in Chongqing for seven weeks of talks.

Chinese state media painted the dialogue as a watershed moment which one analyst compared to Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to China, which paved the way for the normalisation of relations between Beijing and Washington. “This is also an icebreaking meeting,” Tao Wenzhou, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told CCTV, the state broadcaster.

Saturday’s summit, which was unexpectedly announced on Tuesday night, began at 3pm local time at Singapore’s five-star Shangri-La hotel. As Xi and Ma stepped out before the cameras and were bathed in a blaze of camera flashes, the presenter of a live CCTV broadcast told viewers: “This is certainly a landmark handshake.”

On Saturday night, the two men were due to hold a “casual” dinner at the Shang Palace, a high-end Cantonese restaurant where diners can order Australian lobster, Sri Lankan crab and Japanese beef. In an indication of the meeting’s political sensitivities, Xi and Ma were reportedly planning to split the bill.



The summit represents a high point in the seven-year rapprochement between Taipei and Beijing that began in 2008, when Ma Ying-jeou took office, vowing to end the political feud between the two sides. Ma, who will step down next year following a presidential election on 16 January, has overseen a striking improvement in relations with Beijing, which still regards democratically ruled Taiwan as a renegade province.

But that engagement has become increasingly contentious in Taiwan, a vibrant democracy, with many of its 18 million voters fearing closer integration with authoritarian China. Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets last year to protest that growing proximity as part of the Sunflower movement.

Nathan Batto, a political scientist from Taipei’s Academia Sinica, said polls showed that while nearly all Taiwanese supported improved dialogue with China, fewer and fewer now backed the idea of reunification, which is Beijing’s ultimate goal. “The separations between Taiwan and China are much, much deeper than between the Koreas or the Germanys,” Batto said. “The public support here is for good relations with China – nobody wants to have a war – but not for any type of political integration. Taiwanese are very proud of their democracy and want to keep it,” he said.

Nick Bisley, the executive director of La Trobe Asia, said Saturday’s meeting was “probably the biggest thing in cross-strait relations since at least the lifting of travel restrictions” more than a decade ago. But Bisley said there were concerns in Taiwan that Beijing was using the meeting to try to swing the island’s upcoming elections back towards Ma’s Nationalist party (KMT).

Historic meeting of Chinese and Taiwanese presidents prompts hope and suspicion Read more

Tsai Ing-wen, the Democratic Progressive party (DPP) opposition candidate, is widely expected to defeat Beijing’s preferred candidate, KMT chairman Eric Chu. “In 1995/96 they tried to shape the election outcome by lobbing missiles at Taiwan,” Bisley said, referring to the Taiwan Strait crisis. “This time it is a summit.”

Pro-independence protesters reportedly attempted to storm Taiwan’s parliament on Saturday morning. Others gathered at Taipei’s military airport carrying posters attacking Xi as a dictator and Ma as a traitor.



Saturday’s meeting, while the first between the two sides’ leaders, is only the latest in a series of high-level encounters between China and Taiwan, which has been ruled as a de-facto independent state since China’s civil war ended, in 1949, and Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists fled across the Taiwan Strait. The first came in 1993, when envoys from both sides met in Singapore for the first high-level talks since the war.

In 2005, nationalist chairman Lien Chan, then leader of Taiwan’s opposition, met Chinese president Hu Jintao in Beijing. “What we want is conciliation. We want dialogue,” Lien told his host.

Some see the talks as part of a Chinese charm offensive in Asia, designed to reduce tensions in the region amidst an intensifying spat over Beijing’s island campaign building campaign in the South China Sea. “There is a new look and feel to China’s diplomacy,” Xinhua, Beijing’s official news agency, claimed on Friday. “Never before have China’s leaders been so keen to reach out to the world beyond their borders.”

Ben Bland 白杰明 (@benjaminbland) Not that many people here yet. Maybe a few hundred or low single thousands pic.twitter.com/pDO4ATEgUo

In a seven-minute opening speech at the start of Saturday’s summit, Xi told Ma: “Today will be remembered in history. Even though this is the first meeting, we feel like old friends. Behind us is history stretching for 60 years. Now before our eyes there are fruits of conciliation instead of confrontation.”



Ma, who spoke for three minutes, hailed the “unprecedented prosperity” that improved ties between Taiwan and China had brought. “The basis behind this huge transformation has come from peace,” he said, according to Taiwan’s official news agency.

Despite the rhetoric, Nathan Batto, a political scientist at Chengchi University in Taiwan, said the talks were unlikely to lead to any noteworthy breakthroughs. “The expectations are low. I don’t think anybody is expecting any major developments. The fact of the meeting I think is likely to be the most important outcome of the event,” he said.

Nor was it likely to swing next year’s elections back towards the KMT, Beijing’s preferred victor. “It would take a major miracle to reverse that trend,” said Batto.

