Beijing: While the US is preoccupied with extracting itself from its war in Iran, China has been busy getting on with its core interests on its home turf.
This week, that involved shepherding Taiwan’s opposition leader Cheng Li-wun on a self-styled six-day “journey for peace” around China, building up to an expected meeting with leader Xi Jinping in Beijing.
The movements of opposition leaders generally don’t warrant international news, but when it comes to the outsized role that Taiwan plays in the fierce strategic rivalry between the US and China, Cheng’s trip is significant.
As the new chair of Taiwan’s Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) party, a position she was elected to in October, she is the first opposition leader to visit China in a decade.
Beijing’s quick embrace of Cheng is a sign it sees in her an opportunity to advance Xi’s “China dream” sales pitch, the core pillar of which is unifying the democratic island with the mainland, even if Cheng and the KMT remain officially opposed to this. Beijing wants unification to happen peacefully, but has not ruled out using force.
“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 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 too close to China.
She proudly proclaims “I am Chinese”, an identity claimed only by 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, and as her party blocks 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 are anticipating 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 Northeast Asia analyst at the International Crisis Group.
China refuses to talk to Taiwan’s leader Lai Ching-te and his Democratic Progressive Party, which regards Taiwan as a sovereign country. Beijing denounces Lai as a “separatist”, and engages in a near-daily campaign of greyzone harassment, sending its jets and coast guards to patrol around Taiwan’s airspace and waters.
During her multi-city visit, Cheng has called for “reconciliation and unity across the [Taiwan] Strait” in Nanjing while paying homage to Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese revolutionary who founded the KMT. In Shanghai, she said birds, not missiles, should fly in the sky and fish, not warships, should occupy the oceans.
It’s part of her pitch to Taiwanese voters that the KMT offers an alternative “deterrence with dialogue” approach to China relations. It 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 Institute 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 messaging 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. 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 argued that she values Taiwan’s relationship with the US, and that this isn’t undermined by pursuing closes ties with China.
Washington, which is surely closely watching Cheng’s peace journey, might take some convincing.
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Beijing. She was previously a federal political correspondent based in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
