Tricks won't earn Tsai overseas support

New Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen is scheduled to make transit stops in Miami and Los Angeles in the United States during her nine-day overseas trip that will also take her to Panama and Paraguay. The overseas trip starting on Friday will be her first since taking office more than a month ago.

Many of her predecessors have chosen a similar itinerary, but not all of them conveyed goodwill. Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party who was the island leader from 2000 to 2008, had a shameful record of touting "Taiwan's formal independence" to foreign leaders during such visits and thus posing a grave threat to cross-Straits relations.

Whether or not Tsai will resort to the same trick during her overseas trip will be closely watched, as she is yet to offer an unequivocal answer to how she sees the 1992 Consensus, the political foundation of cross-Straits ties. The tradition of "leadership diplomacy" dates back to the 1990s, when Lee Teng-hui, then Taiwan leader, flagrantly violated the 1992 Consensus by trying to convince some "diplomatic allies" that the Chinese mainland and Taiwan were two separate states. In return, he was banned from entering the US during the rest of his tenure.