Xi Jinping (1st R) meets with Ma Ying-jeou (1st L) at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore, Nov. 7, 2015.[Photo/Xinhua]

A key message from the Xi-Ma meeting is that the Chinese people have enough wisdom to sort out their own problems, said Oh Ei Sun, senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Singapore Nanyang Technological University.

"Hopefully the two sides could make such high-level contacts a regular thing in their future interactions," Oh said.

The Singapore meeting between Xi and Ma is a historic event that will definitely be written into text books, said Brazilian expert Ronnie Lins, director of the Brazil-China Center.

While the two sides of the Taiwan Strait still have many differences to work on, they have overcome various challenges to make the top-level meeting a reality, Lins said, adding that the meeting creates new opportunities for the peaceful development of ties across the Taiwan Strait.

The meeting was a wholly positive exercise, in which both sides took a pragmatic, constructive approach regarding their ties, said Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.

Relations across the Taiwan Strait has been moving forward in a slow but steady pace, with economic cooperation being a major driver, said Martin Jacques, a British academic and the author of the global best-seller "When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order."

Jacques said that he expects there will be further improvements in the cross-Strait relations.