00:00Joanna Lei is a former legislator with the Chinese Guomintan Party.
00:05Well, the timing is extremely important because after 10 years of hiatus,
00:11there had been almost no communication across even the second track, which is CEF and ARES.
00:20Those are two foundations established across Taiwan Straits for quasi-governmental exchanges.
00:26There are no communication even between CEF and ARES.
00:30So it is important to prevent miscalculation, unintended escalation, provide new guardrails,
00:38especially when the world is in such a terrible time.
00:41So Zheng Liwen is trying to bring back the time between 2005 and 2016,
00:48during which we established direct flight, visitor's visa, and even government-to-government agreements,
00:5523 signed expanded exchanges in social education and all aspects across Taiwan Straits.
01:02With that as a precedent, Zheng Liwen is trying to bring everything back into that track of peace and development
01:10so that we don't go into the playbook or narrative of the current world events,
01:16because geopolitical forces are pushing us into greater tension and potentially war across Taiwan Straits.
01:22So does this visit then signal a shift in cross-straits policy, or is it continuity?
01:31Well, it's going back. It's back to the future and back to the good old days,
01:35because the cross-straits relationship has three major characteristics.
01:39One is a non-final state.
01:43Second, it's asymmetrical.
01:45Both sides are of really, really different scales.
01:49And thirdly, it's subject to Taiwan's local political electoral results.
01:54So with those three, the two sides can be in really volatile situations.
01:59Unless you intentionally build channel of communications, continue to have guardrails to prevent miscalculations,
02:08then the volatility can have inadvertent results, can trigger inadvertent military confrontations.
02:14So it is really important to re-establish the communication channels and the guardrails.
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