A year before Britain handed Hong Kong to China, then-President Jiang Zemin hailed the "one country, two systems” plan for the city as a model for the country to one day unify with Taiwan.
Taiwan would get "a high degree of autonomy” — the same pledge China used for Hong Kong — while keeping legislative and independent judicial power, and its own armed forces, according to Jiang’s speech, copies of which were distributed at Hong Kong’s handover center in 1997.
For Taiwan though, the proposal has never been an option. Even the Kuomintang — a vestige of the losing side in China’s civil war and the main force backing eventual unification with the mainland, has rejected the model. Making Xi’s task even more daunting is a drastic shift in the consensus in Taiwan against any form of integration with China, thanks to the island’s growing sense of nationhood and to the Chinese Communist Party’s sweeping crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong.
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