Leaders lock hands for 81 long seconds

Xi Jinping and Ma Ying Jeou locked hands and rotated to give the whole room a view of the historic occasion.

The first meeting between the leaders of China and Taiwan since their 1949 civil war division was expected to produce a dramatic handshake - but no one thought it would last 81 seconds.

The marathon grip-and-grin between China's Xi Jinping and Taiwan's Ma Ying Jeou took place amid a barrage of camera flashes from a rapt scrum of reporters clamouring to capture the historic summit's start. There was an audible intake of breath from journalists as the two entered a ballroom of a Singapore luxury hotel.

Xi - whose Communist regime rules over a vastly larger economy and considers Taiwan a rogue province - came to a halt first, forcing Ma to take an extra step forward. They smiled - Ma beaming broadly while Xi was more reserved with mouth closed - and kept their hands locked.

"It felt very good. We both shook hands with a lot of strength," Ma said.

As the seconds ticked along, the shake continued as the pair rotated to give different parts of the room a better view.

Despite both sticking to a carefully worded policy that there is only "one China", Taiwan and China differ over issues including when the country was founded, and also use different Chinese characters. And China made it clear that it still considers Taiwan as less than equal.

When the two sat down for talks it was Xi who spoke first. Ma, a democratic politician used to interacting with the public, held his own relaxed press conference afterward.

But Xi sent a lower-level official to face the media on his behalf. And while Ma left the hotel from its front entrance, pausing to wave to dozens of gathered reporters, Xi apparently exited in secret.

Referring to the handshake at the start of the hour-long, mostly closed-door meeting with Xi, Ma said: "We crossed 66 years of space and time to stretch out our hands and shake them together, holding in our hands the past and future of both sides of the [Taiwan] strait."

"The 66-year history of cross-Strait relations testifies that no matter how great the difficulty, no matter how many risks there are, no force can pull us apart," Xi told Ma.

The meeting comes weeks before elections on the island which are expected to result in victory for Ma's rivals the Democratic Progressive Party - a result Beijing is desperate to avoid given the DPP's traditional stance in favour of independence from China.

"The visuals are important for them," said Michael Cole, a Taiwan expert from the University of Nottingham. "It is a landmark meeting, but in terms of substance there is practically nothing."Telegraph Group Ltd, AFP