Chen calms nerves, but the China time bomb is ticking Taiwan's new president will play for time to allow maximum political change on the mainland, writes Kevin Rudd. TWO questions were hanging over the head of Saturday's inauguration speech of Taiwan's democratically elected President Chen Shui-bian. On the first, Chen appears to have succeeded in calming things down. His speech adroitly applauded the economic miracle that both Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin had brought about in the mainland - while noting that Taiwan had also produced an economic miracle of its own, but had since added the political miracle of democracy. On the Richter scale of abuse from Beijing, this was positively mild.
Apocalypse Now appears to have been postponed.
The answer to the second question is more complex. Chen's language on the independence issue on Saturday was once again relatively conciliatory. But none of these explicitly ad- dresses the core question of One China. Here the language is much muddier. Before Saturday's speech, China's position was that if negotiations were to resume Taiwan must formally accept the One China principle.