Discussion of the “one country, two systems” model under which China governs Hong Kong often overlooks the fact that the approach was originally designed with somewhere else in mind: Taiwan.

For Chinese leaders, the “return” of Hong Kong in 1997 and its diminutive neighbour Macao two years later were mere steps toward a final goal of national reunification that will only be complete when Taiwan is enfolded in the embrace of the “motherland”.

So how much progress have they made toward that goal in the past decade? On paper, at least, not much.

While Beijing officials still ritually invoke “one country, two systems” as the formula for final reunification, 10 years of implementation in Hong Kong have left people on the other side of the Taiwan Strait entirely unmoved.

“The concept was something Taiwan would not even consider 10 years ago, and it is something we wouldn’t consider now,” says George Tsai, a veteran expert on cross-Strait ties at the Institute for International Relations at Taipei’s Chengchi University.

Regular opinion polls conducted for the Taiwan government by several universities and research firms consistently show the percentage of respondents who reject the “one country two systems” formula consistently above 70 per cent over the past 10 years.

Public opinion mattered little in the case of Hong Kong, which was handed over to China by a British government that had long known its colonial control over the harbour city could only endure at Beijing’s sufferance.

Taiwan, however, has in the past two decades become a lively and liberal democracy. Even staunch Chinese nationalists on the island agree that unification with the mainland must be democratically achieved.

Washington, Taiwan’s strongest international supporter, insists that any change in the cross-Strait status quo must be approved by the island’s people.

“You cannot possibly discuss Taiwan and Hong Kong in the same context. We are electing our own president, but they cannot even have a proper parliament,” says Frank Hsieh, presidential candidate of the ruling Democratic Progressive party (DPP). “How could we possibly trade in what we have now for something like that?”

China, which formally espouses a definition of democracy that involves a “people’s democratic dictatorship” under the unelected Communist party, has never accepted that the Taiwanese electorate should have the final say on sovereignty.

Beijing sees Taiwan as a historic part of China, whose separation from the mainland is merely a legacy of the unfinished civil war that saw Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated Kuomintang find refuge on the island in 1949.

Still, China also realises that if its goal of “peaceful reunification” is to be achieved, it will have to sell the idea to Taiwan’s people.

Zhu Rongji, then Chinese premier, said in 1997 he thought the return of Hong Kong would pave the way for Taiwan to follow, but in fact the influence of the former British colony on its neighbour seems negligible.

While political or economic disaster would certainly have made “one country, two systems” even less appealing to Taiwan, Beijing has won no obvious credit there for Hong Kong’s relative stability and prosperity.

And key individual events in Hong Kong, such as the failure of popular appeals for more representative government, have left almost no trace in public opinion in Taiwan.

Mr Tsai of the Institute for International Relations says Taiwanese attitudes towards China are influenced more by direct contact with the mainland than by observation of Hong Kong’s experience.

Despite the political standoff between the two governments, economic and individual contacts across the Strait have grown extremely close. More than a million Taiwanese, or close to 5 per cent of the island’s population, live and work in China.

“I know China. It’s a huge country, and it’s getting stronger and stronger, but they have no right to impose anything on us,” says Liu Ah-mei, a Taiwanese pensioner who says she has travelled to the mainland more than twenty times in tour groups. She says: “What does Hong Kong have to do with that?”

The only visible pattern in Taiwanese views on “one country, two systems” is a surge in rejection rates at times of cross-Strait tension or tough talk from Beijing, such as in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election when Mr Zhu warned independence would mean war.

Still, Chinese officials and analysts continue to blame separatist propaganda for the lack of Taiwanese enthusiasm for reunification on Beijing’s terms.

“One country, two systems have been seriously slandered, smeared and falsely condemned in Taiwan, that’s why the Taiwanese masses don’t have a complete understanding what it really means,” says Sun Yun of the Taiwan Research Centre at China’s Xiamen University.

Certainly, Beijing’s basic offer to Taipei appears considerably more generous than the treatment accorded Hong Kong.

More than a decade ago, China promised the island legislative and judicial independence and the right to maintain its governmental autonomy and also its own military.

While no mainland troops would be sent to Taiwan, senior positions in the central government would be reserved for Taiwanese. Many in Taiwan, however, are unwilling to take Beijing on trust that such terms would be upheld if the island abandoned its claim to separate sovereign status. Meanwhile, a sizeable – and growing – portion of the island’s population do not perceive themselves as Chinese at all.

Since 2000, the ruling DPP has replaced previously unificationist government rhetoric with encouragement for a Taiwanese sense of identity.

That separate identity rests in large part on the fact that the island has been politically divided from the mainland for much longer periods than it ever spent as a province of China.

Many in Beijing remain confident that Taiwan will eventually be part of China. The economies on the two sides of the Strait are increasingly entwined – and mainland growth is increasingly seen as Taiwan’s main engine of economic growth. Taiwanese companies rank among China’s top sources of foreign direct investment with cumulative FDI of more than $100bn, according to Taipei estimates.

China’s boom is also bringing with it increased diplomatic and military clout, which could some day counter the weight of US support for Taipei’s democratic government and provide the means to achieve reunification by force.

Far from expecting imminent progress on reunification, however, Beijing is for the moment more focused on preventing Taiwan from formalising its de facto independence by cutting remaining legal and institutional ties to the mainland.

Chinese officials say they are deeply concerned that Chen Shui-bian, Taiwan president, will push further his Taiwanese identity agenda – especially in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in August 2008.

“The main cross-Strait task right now is not to find a formula that both sides can accept, but to contain and to combat Taiwanese independence activities,” says Mr Sun.

‘One country, two systems’ formula leaves unification talks stuck on the starting blocks

By Kathrin Hille in Taipei

Given that the governments of China and Taiwan have not even semi-officially talked to each other for almost a decade, rhetoric plays an extraordinarily important role in the complicated relationship.

For more than eight years now, the two sides have been clinging to mutually exclusive formulas and the conditions under which they would be ready to resume dialogue. Taipei claims to be an independent state, while Beijing instead demands that the Taiwan government recognise the “one China principle” before there can be any further talks.

Furthermore, Taiwan insists that only the island’s people can decide on their own future, and China says Taiwan must eventually agree to “peaceful unification” under the “one country, two systems” model.

Given this deadlock, Taiwan has in effect started to try to bypass this language altogether. While it has taken some cautious steps on practical issues such as non-stop cross-Strait flights and direct travel between the mainland and Taiwan’s outlying islands, Taipei politicians have all but given up on addressing more long-term political issues.

While Chen Shui-bian, the incumbent president, and his opponents competed for the presidency in 2000 with rivalling visions for ties with China under names such as a common market or the European Union model, these concepts have now disappeared.

“What matters now is not policies but attitude,” says Frank Hsieh, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) candidate for Mr Chen’s succession, adding that if both sides have the will to talk, everything else will fall into place.

Scholars on both sides of the Strait expect that no matter whether Mr Hsieh, a moderate within the DPP, or Ma Ying-jeou, the opposition’s candidate, wins next year’s election, cross-Strait relations will become more relaxed.

But that is no guarantee that the political dispute at the heart of the deadlock can be resolved.

Richard Bush, one of the US’s most distinguished experts on cross-Strait relations says that with its stubborn insistence on the “one country, two systems” formula, Beijing has frustrated two consecutive Taiwanese leaders, Mr Chen and his predecessor, Lee Teng-hui, who started out with a certain willingness to dialogue.

“Taipei’s goal has not been to avoid being a part of China, as Beijing sought to frame it,” he states in a 2005 book. “Rather, the issue was how Taiwan might be part of China . . . . Would the Taipei government be subordinate to the government in Beijing? Or would it be in some sense equivalent . . . ?”

With the formula in place, these questions cannot be addressed.