Xu Jiatun's Early Assessment of Lee Teng-hui

Xu Jiatun (许家屯) was China's representative in Hong Kong in the late 1980s but escaped to the United States in 1990, reportedly due to differences of opinion with Deng Xiaoping (邓小平)over the 1989 Tiananmen (天安门) incident.

But apparently as early as 1989, Xu sent an assessment to Beijing that a shift in the balance of power was occurring in Taiwan from mainlanders to Taiwanese. Apart from predicting that the island's separatist trend would grow, Xu also concluded that the probability of peaceful reunification would decline and the chance of a military solution would grow.

According to Richard C. Bush, what is most interesting about Xu's assessment of Lee Teng-hui (李登辉) as a separatist was "that he based it on Lee's ethnicity, not on his views. That is, Lee must have been in favor of some degree of independence simply because he was Taiwanese."

On hindsight, it appeared that Xu was progressive and insightful. Unlike some modern mandarins in Beijing who continued to be in a state of denial till this very day, he saw and acknowledged way back in the late 1980s a trend that was becoming increasingly obvious, undeniable, and most importantly, irreversible.