President Ma Ying-jeou on the morning of November 7 departed for Singapore to attend a meeting between the leaders of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait later in the day. The president delivered a brief address prior to boarding the aircraft, pledging to make every effort to achieve the objectives laid out before the trip with an eye to forging greater peace in the Taiwan Strait and closer cross-strait cooperation.
In remarks, the president stated that the goal of this trip is to look back at the past and peer into the future. He said that this meeting should consolidate peace in the Taiwan Strait and help maintain the cross-strait status quo.
President Ma commented that over the past seven-and-a-half years, his administration has consistently sought, under the framework of the ROC Constitution, to maintain the status quo of "no unification, no independence, and no use of force" in the Taiwan Strait, and to promote cross-strait interaction on the basis of the 1992 Consensus, whereby each side acknowledges the existence of "one China" but maintains its own interpretation of what that means. Over that same period, the two sides have signed 23 agreements, thus generating an enormous peace dividend in a wide variety of areas and enabling cross-strait relations to be more stable now than at any time in the past 66 years.
The president said that this is an "appropriate time" to further promote the development of cross-strait relations and at the same time establish a mechanism for the leaders of the two sides to meet. Consequently, no matter who serves as ROC president in the future, he or she will have the opportunity to continue to promote cross-strait relations on this new platform, he stated.
President Ma also expressed his gratitude to friends at home and abroad who over the past few days have expressed their interest in and support for this meeting. He pledged that he would strive to achieve the goals that have already been set for this meeting, thus paving the way for greater peace in the Taiwan Strait and closer cross-strait cooperation.
Among those at the airport to see the president off were Deputy Secretary-General to the President Hsiung Kuang-hua (熊光華), Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Lin Join-sane (林中森), and Singapore Trade Office in Taipei Trade Representative Simon Wong Wie Kuen (黃偉權).