China's foreign ministry has announced an extension on a provisional deal with the Vatican that allows for the appointment of bishops. TaiwanPlus speaks to Vatican researcher Thomas Chingwei Tu to find out more about what the extension means for relations between the two countries and what this could mean for Taiwan.
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00:00China's foreign ministry has announced an extension on the provisional agreement to
00:04appoint bishops in China. The original deal was meant to be updated every two years,
00:09but this latest extension is for four years. So what can that tell us about relations between
00:14China and the Vatican? Yeah, I think from the progress, it means that the provisional agreement
00:21has been more stable based on the past few years' experiments. Also, I think the Vatican
00:28has abundant experience before negotiating bishop appointment issues with different countries.
00:34And it is a provisional agreement, which means that it is still under experiment.
00:41Like they have to test whether it works in China. So now from every two years,
00:47they have to renew the agreement now to four every four years, which means that the experiment is
00:53going well. So it's good news for both sides, because I think from the negotiating counterpart,
00:59they all want to settle things down as soon as possible. Strengthening relations with China
01:04has been a goal for Pope Francis, but he's also faced criticism for this deal specifically.
01:10Why is that? Yeah, because I think most of the people in the world agree that China is not a
01:16country with religious freedom. The case in China is even worse under Xi Jinping's governing.
01:22Therefore, it will be very complicated for people, especially for those who are not Catholics, to believe
01:30that or to imagine that how the Vatican would like to sign a contract with China. But I think for
01:36Pope Francis, his first priority is to protect Catholic people in China. So even we both
01:43agreed that. I think also from Pope Francis' side, he also agreed that now current situation in China,
01:50Catholic Church in China is facing a very stressful situation. The Vatican is one of
01:55Taiwan's remaining allies. Will this deal with China have any effect on that? I think the Vatican
02:01keeps its promise to Republic of China Taiwan. We still have our ambassador in Rome and we have
02:08their charge d'affaires in Taipei for more than 40 years. They also keep aiming for equilibrium
02:16on both sides. So we can see that they have renewed the agreement at the end of September,
02:21but they announced it only before the expiration of the last one, the last version. It technically
02:28avoided showing support for either side during our national day celebration period. So it escaped
02:35from this very dangerous situation. Also, in the early of the month, the Vatican sent its
02:42representative, Cardinal Tong Hong, to Kaohsiung to support our Taiwan bishop conference holding
02:49the National European Congress of Taiwan on October 5th. So they tried to manage the balance
02:56for both sides, for the cross-strait both sides.