Opinion | Xi Jinping won’t force unification on Taiwan for now, the show of force by China’s PLA notwithstanding

For the first time in years, two Chinese fighter jets crossed into Taiwanese airspace on March 31, causing Taiwan to scramble its own aircraft in a tense stand-off. What impact will this incident have on cross-strait relations, and will a similar stand-off eventually lead to an accidental exchange of fire?

So far, both President Tsai Ing-wen and her colleague at the Democratic Progressive Party, former premier William Lai Ching-te, a self-proclaimed “pragmatic Taiwan independence worker”, have said they would seek nomination for the contest. We can’t rule out the possibility that the DPP will turn to some underhand means to try to win the election, but it would not want to trigger a Chinese campaign to force unification.

This does not mean Beijing does not want to resolve the Taiwan issue as soon as possible, but now is not the time. We know this from the fact that Taiwan was not made an issue during the Two Sessions meetings of China’s political leaders last month.

At the gathering of the National People’s Congress, Premier Li Keqiang spoke about Taiwan in his government work report, but only in a routine mention of the importance of upholding the “one China” policy. In his press conference, the focus was on China’s offer of “preferential policies” for Taiwan. The island did not even come up in Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s press conference at the two sessions, which was surprising considering the spike in cross-strait tensions since the beginning of this year, when President Xi Jinping called on Taiwan to accept a “one country, two systems” model of unification in a tough speech.