Spotlight: International community hails Xi-Ma meeting as inspiring event

The historic meeting between Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore is an inspiring event and the high-level dialogue will be a powerful boost to relations between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, foreign government agencies and experts said.

Amid intensive attention from across the globe, Xi and Ma met on Saturday afternoon in the first meeting between leaders of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait since 1949.

During the meeting, the two leaders acknowledged major achievements made in peaceful development of cross-Strait relations since 2008. Both sides agreed to continue to stick to the 1992 Consensus, consolidate common political ground, promote peaceful development of cross-Strait relations and safeguard peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait.

A statement by the French Foreign Ministry said France welcomes the historic meeting and supports cross-Strait peace, dialogue and cooperation, and believes the meeting is a positive step toward this direction.

The EU's diplomatic service EEAS also released a statement, saying Saturday's first-ever meeting in Singapore between the leaders from the two sides of the Taiwan Strait is an encouraging step, demonstrating the level of trust that has been built through the ongoing process of rapprochement.

The EU looks forward to the continuation of the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations, to the benefit of the people on both sides of the Strait, the statement said.

The meeting is an important milestone in the development of cross-Strait relations, and also for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, said Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asia Institute of National University of Singapore (NUS).

The meeting reaffirmed both sides' adherence to the 1992 Consensus, Zheng said, adding that the two sides have achieved remarkable progress in the development of their relations in the past several years and these achievements are possible only because both sides have adhered to the 1992 Consensus.

The 1992 Consensus serves as the political fundamental for the cross-Strait ties and no matter which political party comes to power in Taiwan, it should act with caution regarding the consensus, said Tseng Hui-yi, a research associate from the same NUS institute.

A key message from the Xi-Ma meeting is that the Chinese people have enough wisdom to sort out their own problems, said Oh Ei Sun, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Singapore Nanyang Technological University.

"Hopefully the two sides could make such high-level contacts a regular thing in their future interactions," Oh said.

The Singapore meeting between Xi and Ma is a historic event that will definitely be written into text books, said Brazilian expert Ronnie Lins, director of the Brazil-China Center.

While the two sides of the Taiwan Strait still have many differences to work on, they have overcome various challenges to make the top-level meeting a reality, Lins said, adding that the meeting creates new opportunities for the peaceful development of ties across the Taiwan Strait.

The meeting was a wholly positive exercise, in which both sides took a pragmatic, constructive approach regarding their ties, said Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.

Relations across the Taiwan Strait has been moving forward in a slow but steady pace, with economic cooperation being a major driver, said Martin Jacques, a British academic and the author of the global best-seller "When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order."

Jacques said that he expects there will be further improvements in the cross-Strait relations. Endi