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TAIPEI: Taiwan's pro-independence opposition will take to the streets this weekend in what they say will be the biggest anti-China rally since the island's Beijing-friendly administration came to power.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is hoping for a turnout of 300,000 for the march through downtown Taipei, and for a further 100,000 to attend an all-night sit-in protest in the presidential office square.
"We want to tell the world that Taiwan's future is not up to President Ma Ying-jeou or the Kuomintang (KMT)," DPP spokesman Cheng Wen-tsang said, ahead of Ma's first anniversary as the president.
However, just 32 per cent of 1,019 people surveyed this week by the TVBS cable news network backed the march, which organisers said is aimed at stopping the island's sovereignty from being undermined by the KMT's close ties with China.
Forty-four per cent said they opposed the rally.
Relations between Taiwan and its former bitter rival China, which split in 1949 at the end of a civil war, had hit rock bottom amid perceived provocative anti-China remarks by Ma's predecessor Chen Shui-bian.
But they improved dramatically after Ma was inaugurated in May last year.
The two sides have since held three rounds of meetings and signed a raft of agreements that led to regular direct flights across the Taiwan Strait and greater cooperation between Taipei and Beijing.
As a result, a trickle of Chinese tourists visiting the island has become a flood, with more than 3,000 arriving each day over the past few weeks – a development Ma said has benefited the island's sagging economy.
Taiwan will, for the first time in nearly four decades, attend a meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA) – the World Health Organisation's (WHO's) highest decision-making body – as an observer on May 18, using the name Chinese Taipei, its title in international sporting events.
Analysts said the WHO invitation suggested Beijing had dropped its longstanding opposition to Taipei joining the body, although this was never explicitly stated by either side.
Since 1997, the island's annual attempts to join the WHA have been thwarted by China, which said Taiwan had no right to join the organisation – as a member, quasi-member or observer.
But while Ma said it was his administration's biggest achievement since last year due to his diplomatic truce with China, the WHA invitation has made the DPP feel more uneasy as they suspect the island's sovereignty has been compromised.
In a letter to supporters, DPP chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen accused the Ma administration of "turning Taiwan's sovereignty into a tool in exchange for uncertain economic benefits from China".
Ma "has also belittled Taiwan, lowering its status to an area, so as to help disperse his homesickness", Tsai said, an allegation flatly rejected by the Kuomintang.
Born in Hong Kong, Ma was the son of a Kuomintang official who fled from China's communists more than half a century ago.
The DPP has criticised the Ma administration for pushing for a controversial trade agreement with China, insisting it could spell disaster for Taiwan's economy, prompting an exodus of local manufacturers.
The DPP also called on supporters to march against the Ma administration's alleged inability to boost the economy.
Taiwan, the sixth biggest economy in Asia, has been hit hard by the global financial crisis with a record 5.81 per cent unemployment rate and its April exports falling 34.3 per cent year-on-year to 14.85 billion US dollars for the eighth consecutive monthly fall.
- AFP/so
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