Beijing courts Taiwan’s opposition leader ahead of Trump visit

Beijing: In a rare meeting designed to send signals to Washington and Taipei, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwan’s opposition leader, Cheng Li-wun, projected a carefully packaged message of peace across the strait.

“Compatriots on both sides of the strait are all Chinese – people of one family who want peace, development, exchange and co-operation,” Xi told Cheng on Friday, as he welcomed her into Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

“No matter how the international situation changes, the trend of compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait coming together will not change.”

Left unspoken for this public spectacle – though regularly trumpeted by Beijing in other forums – is China’s end goal of controlling the democratic island, by peaceful means if possible, and by force if necessary. But Xi’s message was clear: neither Washington nor its allies would stand in the way of China’s reunification dream.

Cheng, the new chair of Taiwan’s Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) party, is the first sitting opposition leader to visit China in a decade.

Her meeting with Xi was the pinnacle of her self-styled six-day “journey for peace” around China. It’s part of her “deterrence with dialogue” pitch to Taiwanese voters that the KMT’s approach to cross-strait relations will ease tensions, in contrast to the situation under President Lai Ching-te, who is reviled by Beijing.

She has used the platform to assert that conflict is not inevitable and that Taiwan should not “become a chessboard for external interference”, echoing the phrasing Beijing uses to denounce US support for the island.

Beijing’s quick embrace of Cheng is a sign it sees in her an opportunity to advance Xi’s reunification agenda – even if Cheng and the KMT remain officially opposed to this, as are most Taiwanese – and to influence Taiwan’s domestic politics without having to engage with its government.

“By far, she’s the most pro-China person we’ve seen from the KMT in a long time,” says Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Taiwan University in Taipei.

“I think Beijing has taken a very big interest in her because she has been saying and doing all the things that Beijing wants from a leader in the KMT.”

Her trip is infused with optics. Once a firebrand champion of Taiwanese independence in her youth, Cheng, 56 – a possible candidate for the island’s 2028 presidential elections – has been criticised by her rivals as being too close to China.

She proudly proclaims “I am Chinese”, an identity claimed by just a small minority in Taiwan, where polling routinely shows most people see themselves as Taiwanese or a combination of Taiwanese-Chinese.

Her visit has the added significance of coming weeks before US President Donald Trump’s own meeting with Xi in Beijing, where Taiwan is expected to be a key agenda item. Her party is also blocking a $US40 billion ($56 billion) special defence budget in Taiwan’s parliament, a large chunk of which is earmarked for US weapons purchases.

Many analysts anticipate that Xi will press Trump to rein in the US’s arms sales to Taiwan.

“The trip demonstrates to Washington that China continues to have a channel of its own preference to communicate and engage with Taiwan, even if it’s not the government in power,” says William Yang, a senior north-east Asia analyst at the International Crisis Group.

China refuses to talk to Lai’s government and his Democratic Progressive Party, which regards Taiwan as a sovereign country. Beijing denounces Lai as a “separatist”, and it engages in a near-daily campaign of grey zone harassment, sending its jets and coast guards to patrol around Taiwan’s airspace and waters.

Cheng’s message of “reconciliation and unity across the [Taiwan] Strait” lands at a time when Taiwan’s faith in the US as a reliable ally has been eroded under the Trump administration.

One poll by the Brookings Institution last year showed only 37.5 per cent of Taiwanese believed the US would help defend it in a military conflict with China, down from 44.5 per cent under the Biden administration.

But Cheng’s tour also comes with hazards for her own political aspirations.

Her comments and tone will be forensically analysed and debated in Taiwan, where there is deepening polarisation between supporters of Lai’s government and the opposition camps, particularly on the question of managing relations with China. But parroting Beijing’s reunification agenda is still an act of political self-harm.

“The Taiwanese public, at the end of the day, is very sensitive to any politician’s remarks that sound like agreeing to China’s claim that Taiwan is part of China,” Wang says.

As part of this balancing act, Cheng has said she values Taiwan’s relationship with the US, and that this isn’t undermined by pursuing closer ties with China.

Washington, which is surely closely watching Cheng’s peace journey, might take some convincing.

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