Taiwan’s main opposition leader, Cheng Li-wun of the Kuomintang Party (KMT), arrived in China on Tuesday for a rare six-day visit she described as a peace mission.
The trip comes as China has stepped up military drills around the island — which Beijing claims as its own territory — and as the U.S. presses Taiwan to spend billions on American weapons. Speaking to reporters in Taipei before boarding, Cheng stressed the need for dialogue with Beijing. “If you truly love Taiwan, you will seize every opportunity and every possibility to prevent Taiwan from being ravaged by war,” she said. “Preserving peace is preserving Taiwan.”
China’s State Council Taiwan Affairs Office said the visit will have a “significant” and “positive impact” on maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, according to state-run Xinhua. Cheng and a KMT delegation will visit Shanghai and Nanjing before arriving in Beijing, where Taiwanese media report she may meet Chinese president Xi Jinping. It is the first visit by a sitting KMT leader to China in nearly a decade.
Taiwanese reaction was mixed. Wen Wen-fu, a businessman from New Taipei City, said he did not think the visit was a good thing and urged leaders to consider the wishes of Taiwan’s more than 23 million people. By contrast, Lee Jen-hsing, a businessman based in eastern China’s Kunshan, called the trip “definitely a good thing” because of close cross-strait ties.
Beijing paused many exchanges with the KMT and most state-level ties with Taipei after the KMT lost power to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 2016. Beijing views the DPP and Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, as separatists; the KMT accepts that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one China, though each side interprets “one China” differently, said Xin Qiang, head of the Center for Taiwan Studies at Fudan University.
In recent years Beijing has intensified military activity near Taiwan, including large exercises that effectively encircled the island last year. Taiwan’s parliament is locked in a bitter debate over a DPP-led request for an additional $40 billion in defense spending, part of which would buy more U.S. weapons.
Analysts say Beijing is signaling it is open to dialogue as well as deterrence. Wen-ti Sung of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub said Beijing will use the visit to show there are still Beijing-friendly voices in Taiwan. U.S. President Trump, who plans to meet Xi in May, has suggested he would be open to discussing future American arms sales to Taiwan with Xi — comments that Yen Wei-ting of Academia Sinica says have eroded trust in the U.S. and created a “political window for Cheng.”
Critics warn Cheng may be playing into Beijing’s “United Front” strategy, which seeks to treat Taiwan as an internal matter. Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council minister, Chiu Chui-cheng, cautioned that while Cheng can visit China she is not authorized to negotiate on behalf of Taiwan’s elected government. “Peace can be an ideal, but not a fantasy,” Chiu said.
Valentine reporting from Taiwan and Pak reporting from Kunshan, eastern China.
