President Chen Shui-bian called Sunday for the opening of peace talks with mainland China in a conciliatory overture after President Hu Jintao's consolidation of power last month in Beijing.
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In a National Day speech here, Chen urged a special emphasis on arms control after a mainland Chinese buildup of ballistic missiles pointed at Taiwan and a recent Taiwanese threat to rocket Shanghai if the mainland attacks. "I propose that both sides should seriously consider the issue of arms control and take concrete actions to reduce tension and military threats across the Taiwan Strait," Chen said, later adding, "In the long term, both sides should formally end the state of hostility across the Taiwan Strait and establish confidence-building measures through consultations and dialogues."
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Hu asked President George W. Bush in a telephone call last Thursday not to proceed with plans to sell surveillance aircraft and other military equipment to Taiwan. After talks in Beijing on Saturday with Hu, the French president, Jacques Chirac, warned at a news conference, "We are worried about the tense situation in this region that is currently worsening." There was no immediate response from Beijing to Chen's proposal. Foreign policy analysts predicted that mainland officials would initially reject it.
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Chen is deeply distrusted, disliked and even despised by Beijing officials for his long advocacy of greater political independence for Taiwan - a record that made his conciliatory tone on Sunday all the more noteworthy. But Hu's consolidation of power in China - he became the chairman of the Central Military Commission after the unexpected resignation last month of the former president, Jiang Zemin - has created new interest in Taipei and Washington in trying to reduce tensions across the Taiwan Strait.
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Chen made a clear reference on Sunday to Hu, who leads the new generation of political leaders in Communist China. "Cross-strait relations are not necessarily a zero-sum game," Chen said. "There will never be a winner unless it's a win-win situation for both sides. I believe the fourth-generation leadership on the other side of the strait should be able to fully understand this point."
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Next January will mark the 10th anniversary of a speech by Jiang that laid out a fairly hard line on Taiwan. Chinese leaders have given speeches each January since then reiterating the same positions.
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Taiwanese officials have been hoping that by taking a softer tack now, they might prompt a review and revision of policies in Beijing by January.
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Chen's room for political maneuver is somewhat limited until then anyway because of legislative elections on Dec. 11. Chen's Democratic Progressive Party, which has traditionally favored greater independence, looks increasingly likely to capture a majority for the first time with its allies, the Taiwan Solidarity Union.
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The two parties favoring closer relations with the mainland - the Nationalist Party and the People First Party - are locked in a fratricidal struggle for the support of the island's dwindling number of voters sympathetic to the mainland and are expected to lose seats as a result under Taiwan's complex electoral rules.
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In the section of Chen's speech likely to receive the greatest scrutiny in Beijing, he suggested for the first time that Taiwan and mainland China revive a brief flurry of contacts in Hong Kong and Singapore in 1992 between Taiwanese and Chinese officials.
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Those contacts were possible then because the Nationalist Party was still ruling Taiwan and because Taiwan and China agreed then that they both had a "one-China policy," and agreed to disagree on what exactly that policy was.
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But while Chen suggested that these contacts resume, he also made a series of assertions of Taiwanese sovereignty that are certain to infuriate mainland officials.
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Most notably, he seemed to define the Republic of China, the legal name that the government here has used for decades, as the island of Taiwan but not the mainland.
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"The sovereignty of the Republic of China is vested with the 23 million people of Taiwan," he said. "The Republic of China is Taiwan, and Taiwan is the Republic of China. This is an indisputable fact."
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Andrew Yang, the secretary general of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, an independent research group here, said Chen seemed to want to revive the 1992 contacts while distancing himself from the acceptance of the one-China principle that underpinned them.
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"It seems that the premise is to reopen the dialogue on an equal footing," Yang said, as talks between sovereign countries, something that Beijing is unlikely to accept.
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Persuading the mainland to accept limits on arms purchases could also be difficult. Rapid economic growth on the mainland has allowed the People's Liberation Army to invest heavily in new missiles and other military equipment.
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Taiwan's government is still struggling to find the money to pay for American weapons that Bush approved for sale three years ago.
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Chen said his government was also working on plans for chartered flights between the mainland and Taiwan and wanted to improve protections for cross-strait investments.
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Taiwan is one of the biggest sources of investment on the mainland.
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A parade preceding Chen's speech reflected his conciliatory tone: Instead of rows of soldiers shouting martial slogans about retaking the mainland, honor guards from the army, the navy and the air force performed a dancelike drill with twirling rifles to the melody from "La Bamba," while young girls in traditional southeastern Chinese attire twirled parasols and boys pulled streamers of bright green, the color of Chen's party.
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The choice of music was partly in honor of visiting diplomats from several small Latin American countries.

Source: IHT