Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou came together in Singapore on Saturday afternoon in the first meeting between leaders of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait since 1949, turning a historic page in cross-Strait relations.

Both dressed in dark suits, Xi in a red tie and Ma in a blue one, the two leaders shook hands at around 3 p.m. local time before going on to a closed-door meeting at the Shangri-La Hotel.

Under blinding camera flash, they smiled warmly at each other and shook hands firmly for more than a minute.

“Today will be remembered in history,” Xi, Chinese president and general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, said in his remarks before the meeting.

Ma said the handshake brought together “both the past and the future of the two sides across the Strait, as well as the hopes of the rise of the Chinese nation.”

… Li Mingjiang, an associate professor with S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, noted that although the Chinese mainland and Taiwan had both referred to the 1992 Consensus on different occasions in the past, the fact that leaders across the Taiwan Strait made a clear mention of the term during Saturday’s meeting gives it a whole new meaning.