Don't be fooled. The 'defensive referendum' planned by Taiwan's president Chen Shui-bian on March 20 may have attracted lots of attention, but in reality it is little more than a distraction. The important business that day will be the closely fought presidential election. Voters will choose between Mr Chen's vision of Taiwan and mainland China as separate states, and an opposition that is more serious about establishing a working relationship with Beijing than it has been in a decade. The real referendum, therefore, will not be the official one; but rather the presidential election. After that, cross-strait ties will never be the same.
Taiwan has, of course, had important presidential elections before. The island's direct presidential poll in 1996, which was not just the first since the founding in 1911 of the Republic of China, but unprecedented in thousands of years of Chinese history, was hardly insignificant. Nor was the next poll in 2000, when Mr Chen, of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), became the first non-Kuomintang (KMT) president of Taiwan. The transfer of power itself was peaceful, confirming to the rest of the world that Taiwan was serious about democracy.
But these two polls had less significance for Taiwan's mainland policy. Lee Teng-hui, first appointed president in 1988, won by a landslide in 1996, and so continuity was the name of the game. The government continued to pay lip-service to the KMT's official goal of unification, while promoting policies designed to strengthen Taiwan's separate identity.
On the surface at least, the DPP's mainland policy since 2000 has been little different. This might seem surprising. In office, Mr Lee might have sought to strengthen the Taiwanese identity, but the DPP is openly pro-independence with its policy platform including a pledge to create a Republic of Taiwan. However, fearful of scaring away more-moderate voters, before the last election Mr Chen noticeably toned down the pro-independence rhetoric, which until then had been one of his trademarks. Indeed, the focus of his campaign was good governance, not independence. Even then, Mr Chen won just 39 per cent of the vote so if he wanted to take a more radical line after taking office, he lacked the political strength to do so.
The situation is very different this time. In the aftermath of its humiliating defeat in 2000, the KMT and Mr Lee parted ways, and the party proceeded to ease up on his localisation drive. There has been no return to the traditional loud advocacy of unification. Such a stance would be political suicide; indeed, in the current campaign, KMT leaders have said they could even consider independence. This is substantively different to promoting independence as a goal, however, and in reality the party is now the keenest it has been since the early 1990s to establish some kind of working relationship with Beijing. This is possible even without tackling the contentious issue of political union. Direct transport links between the two sides, legal protection for Taiwan investors in the mainland, and visits by mainland tourists to the island would all make for a full agenda of cross-strait talks.
The DPP, on the other hand, has moved firmly in the other direction. Gone is the cautious 2000 version of Mr Chen, replaced by an increasingly confident president who has put the issue of Taiwan's place in the world right at the centre of the campaign. His call for a referendum to safeguard 'national security and sovereignty' has grabbed most headlines, but Mr Chen has also called for the drafting of a new constitution. His commitment to 'five no's', the handful of pledges he made in 2000 to preserve the status quo in cross-strait relations, also appears to be weakening.
