TAIPEI—Taiwan and China just held a leadership-level summit, of sorts. This past week, Cheng Li-wun, the chairperson of Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), made a rare visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It culminated in the much-anticipated summit between Cheng and Chinese President Xi Jinping in his capacity as the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) General Secretary.
For Beijing, Cheng’s visit is a key part of its latest experimentation with what could be called party-to-party diplomacy between the CCP and KMT, in place of government-to-government diplomacy between Beijing and Taipei.
The trip is notable for what Cheng and Xi said and for its far-reaching implications, but also for taking place at all. It was the first visit to the PRC by a sitting KMT chair since 2016, when then leader of the KMT, Hung Hsiu-chu, led a delegation to Beijing and Nanjing. Like Cheng, Hung was a relative outsider within the KMT establishment and represented the more Beijing-friendly wing of the party. None of the three KMT chairmen who served between Hung and Cheng visited the PRC; they were apparently deemed insufficiently amenable to Beijing to receive an invitation.
Where did the KMT delegation go and why?
In China, Cheng’s delegation visited Nanjing, Shanghai, and Beijing. These stops underscored her philosophical, economic, and political narratives. In Nanjing, Cheng visited the mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen, who is considered the KMT’s spiritual godfather. She then went to Shanghai, where she highlighted Taiwanese business interests in China and met with the city’s party secretary, Chen Jining, a frontrunner to join the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee next year. Finally, she held a summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing to present herself as the contemporary cross-strait peacemaker.
At a time of growing cross-strait tensions, and as Beijing refuses to talk with Taipei’s popularly elected Democratic Progressive Party government, Cheng sought to show that she alone could bring peace.
What did Xi and Cheng say at their summit?
Xi met with Cheng in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People alongside two other Politburo Standing Committee members, Cai Qi and Wang Huning. In his speech, Xi made a four-point proposal: that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait ought to “harmonize minds, protect shared homeland, promote welfare, and materialize great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.” Taken together, these amount to Xi demanding that Taiwanese recognize that the two sides both belong to the same one China.
More important than the content of Xi’s statements was his tone. His main sentiment seemed to be relatively conciliatory and allowed room for constructive ambiguity for his guests. Notably, Xi’s public remarks did not include the words “One China Principle,” or “One Country, Two Systems,” and instead he spoke only of the slightly more ambiguous formulation “1992 Consensus.” There was also no joint statement afterward, leaving Cheng to hold her own solo press conference, which gave her the space to frame the meeting to her political advantage.
Another notable point was that Xi openly framed opposing Taiwan’s independence and foreign interference as a core political foundation for cross-strait relations. Foreign interference in this instance is likely a codeword for US arms sales and defense cooperation with Taiwan. The visit came at a time when Taiwan’s legislature is set to vote on a forty-billion-dollar special defense budget to boost Taiwan’s defenses, which Washington has urged the government to pass. In response to Xi’s comments, Cheng called on the two sides to “pursue institutional arrangements” as an important mechanism for preventing a cross-strait war.
What’s behind these statements?
How should Cheng’s comments be read? A quick refresher of the KMT’s recent relations with Beijing is instructive. Cheng’s immediate predecessor as KMT chair, Eric Chu, spoke of “2Ds”: defense and dialogue. The KMT’s 2024 presidential candidate, Hou Yu-ih, similarly spoke of “3Ds”: defense and dialogue to achieve deescalation.
In other words, KMT’s leadership prior to Cheng thought that preventing war required two courses of action: 1) boosting Taiwan’s defense to achieve deterrence and 2) pursuing political accommodation with Beijing to dissuade the PRC from invading.
Cheng’s call to “pursue institutional arrangements” indicates that she leans much more heavily toward the latter option, perhaps even signaling a skepticism of the defense-and-deterrence approach. Xi named “opposing foreign interference” as a political precondition, and Cheng’s proposal to pursue institutional arrangements with Beijing is likely only to happen if the KMT accepts Beijing’s political preconditions. Thus, if Cheng were to honor her pledge, this would mean directing her party’s legislators to slow down Taiwan’s purchase of arms from the United States and chip away at the special defense budget bill in the legislature. This would be in line with the stance that Cheng took on the Taiwanese defense budget bill in mid-March, when she committed to pass only as little as around 30 percent of the expenditures in the current proposal.
Seemingly satisfied with Cheng’s position during the summit, the next day Beijing announced ten measures to advance cross-strait ties. The measures included liberalization on tourism, agricultural, and fishery exports to China, among others. These were deliverables and political souvenirs for Cheng, announced just hours before she landed in Taipei for her homecoming press conference.
The implications for the Trump–Xi summit and Taiwan’s future
What did Beijing want from this visit? For starters, it likely wanted a cordial photo-op with Taiwan’s opposition leader to take the wind out of the sails of US-Taiwan defense cooperation. The visuals of the two smiling leaders are designed to send three important signals: that there is still a sizable enough number of China doves inside Taiwan, that there is a Taiwanese leader capable of getting along with Xi, and that accommodation with Beijing remains a viable option for Taipei (and a much cheaper one than the defense-and-deter alternative at that).
The best-case scenario for Beijing is that a successful KMT visit will help sideline the inconvenient issue of cross-strait tensions during the upcoming Trump–Xi summit, which is currently scheduled for May. By extension, it may transform the tenor of that summit into a commercial meeting centered on business deals rather than a geopolitical talk focused on the thorny issues of strategic competition and deterrence. And Beijing would much rather deal with US President Donald Trump as a businessman than as a geopolitician.
For its part, the KMT just proved itself to be the only major Taiwanese party with a direct line to Beijing. The Xi-Cheng photo-op strengthened the case for KMT’s low-ball approach to the special defense budget. KMT’s doubling-down on China outreach plus the recent legal troubles for the de facto leader of the Taiwan People’s Party, Taiwan’s third-largest party, will strengthen pan-opposition unity between the two. This means that Taiwan’s hyper-partisan standoffs in the legislature will likely continue at least through Taiwan’s local elections in November.
For Cheng, the meeting with Xi was a crowning moment that sealed her place as the next standard-bearer of the KMT’s Beijing-friendly faction, transforming her from a dark-horse candidate to be the chair just six months ago into a genuine political heavyweight. In the short term, the Xi-Cheng meeting will likely tilt the KMT’s internal balance of power in favor of its China dove wing. But it will also risk tanking the KMT’s electoral prospects at Taiwan’s local elections this fall given Taiwanese voters’ long-standing antipathy to the CCP—the latest poll shows 73.9 percent of Taiwanese dislike the CCP.
