Importing dataSet XML whitespace to create blank line

I would like to import a dataset which contains a text-content data which has several <p>text</p> elements in it, one of them being a separating blank 'paragraph' designed to put a simple carriage-return into the bound text-area.
What happens is that when I import such an XML file, the empty <p> tag has its whitespace ignored, and the blank line does not get produced.  Even when exporting a dataset with a variable which was produced from a textframe which has a blank line in between a topmost and bottom-most line, when importing back, the line disappears. Simply put, is there any way to make my desired blank line with any kind of setting or XML trickery? I already tried putting a nextline in CDATA in the 'empty' <p>, and setting the attribute 'xml:space="preserve"' on the empty <p>.