Opposition leader Cheng Li-wun visits Beijing, expected to meet with Xi Jinping
Updated ,first published
Beijing: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwan’s opposition leader Cheng Li-wun offered a carefully packaged message of peace across the Strait at a rare meeting to send signals to Washington and Taipei.
“The citizens on both sides of the Strait are all Chinese, people of one family who want peace, development, change and cooperation,” Xi told Cheng on Friday as he welcomed him to Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. he said.
“No matter how the international situation changes, the tendency for citizens on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to come together will not change.”
Although constantly declared by Beijing in other forums, what this public spectacle has left unspoken is China’s ultimate 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 could stand in the way of China’s dream of reunification.
Cheng, the new chairman of Taiwan’s Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) party, became the first opposition leader to visit China in a decade.
His meeting with Xi was the culmination of what he called a six-day “peace journey” around China. It is part of the “deterrence through dialogue” narrative to Taiwanese voters that the KMT’s approach to cross-strait relations will ease tensions, unlike the situation under President Lai Ching-te, which Beijing decries.
He used the platform to argue that conflict is not inevitable and that Taiwan should not “become a chessboard for foreign intervention,” echoing the phrase Beijing has used to condemn U.S. support for the island.
Beijing’s rapid embrace of Cheng is a sign that Xi sees it as an opportunity to advance his reunification agenda and influence Taiwan’s domestic politics without engaging with the government, even though Cheng and the KMT, like most Taiwanese, officially oppose it.
“So far he’s the most pro-China person we’ve seen in the KMT in a long time,” says Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Taiwan University in Taipei.
“I think Beijing took great interest in him because he was saying and doing everything Beijing wanted from a leader in the KMT.”
His journey is infused with optics. Cheng, 56, who was once a fierce supporter of Taiwanese independence in his youth and a possible candidate for the island’s 2028 presidential election, has been criticized by rivals for being too close to China.
He proudly declares “I am Chinese,” an identity held by only a small minority in Taiwan; surveys show that most people consider themselves Taiwanese or mixed Taiwanese-Chinese.
It is of particular importance that his visit comes a few weeks before US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Xi in Beijing, where Taiwan is expected to be an important agenda item. His party is also blocking Taiwan’s parliament’s $40 billion ($56 billion) special defense budget, much of which is devoted to US arms purchases.
Many analysts predict that Xi will pressure Trump to rein in U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
“This trip shows Washington that China, even without the ruling government, continues to have a channel of its choice to communicate and engage with Taiwan,” says William Yang, senior northeast Asia analyst at the International Crisis Group.
China refuses to talk to Lai’s government and his Democratic Progressive Party, which views Taiwan as a sovereign country. Beijing accuses Lai of being a “separatist” and has waged an almost daily campaign of gray zone harassment, sending its jets and coast guards to patrol Taiwan’s airspace and waters.
Cheng’s message of “worldwide reconciliation and unity” [Taiwan] The Strait comes down at a time when Taiwan’s faith in the United States as a reliable ally is eroding under the Trump administration.
A Brookings Institution poll last year showed that only 37.5 percent of Taiwanese believe the United States would help defend itself in a military conflict with China; This rate was 44.5 percent during the Biden administration.
But Cheng’s tour also brings dangers to his own political ambitions.
His comments and tone will be forensically analyzed and debated in Taiwan, where there is deepening polarization between supporters of Lai’s government and opposition camps, especially over the management of relations with China. But repeating Beijing’s reunification agenda is still an act of political self-destruction.
“Taiwanese people are, after all, very sensitive to remarks from any politician that appears to accept China’s claim that Taiwan is part of China,” Wang says.
As part of this balancing act, Cheng argued that Taiwan values its relationship with the United States and that closer ties with China do not undermine that.
It may take some time to convince Washington, which is certainly watching Cheng’s peace journey closely.
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Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Beijing. He was previously a federal political correspondent in Canberra.Connect with: X or email.
