Ms. Cheng goes to Beijing

This week, Cheng Li-wun, the head of Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang party, will head to the People’s Republic of China—Shanghai, Nanjing, and ultimately the Chinese capital, the first KMT leader to visit in nearly a decade. Her party ruled mainland China before Mao’s Communists won the civil war in 1949 and drove them to Taiwan. Then, for decades, the KMT governed the island as a one-party state. Now they’re in the opposition—and, of all things, the party most willing to negotiate with Beijing.

China has never renounced the use of force to take Taiwan. In fact, conspicuously in recent years, it’s stepped up military flights into Taiwanese airspace, ramped up cyberattacks, and grown more threatening in its rhetoric. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party remains staunchly committed to independence—making the KMT the Chinese government’s best hope for a friendlier government across the strait.

Why is Cheng off to Beijing now—and why would Beijing want her there?

Two and a half years ago, as Taiwan prepared for a presidential election dominated by questions about the mainland, Hsin-Hsin Pan explored here in The Signal what China could actually get from the Taiwanese opposition. While Beijing courts the KMT because it’s the one party in Taiwan open to talks about its future with China, Pan says, support for unification has collapsed across the island—down to somewhere between 7 and 8 percent since Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in 2020. At the same time, democracy itself has become “the single, unifying political value shared across all parties” in Taiwan. A dominant national consensus.

From October 2023, Pan on how people in Taiwan see the threat from the mainland, and why the ideas and institutions of freedom may be the island’s strongest defense …

Being Taiwan

How do people on the island see the threat from mainland China? Hsin-Hsin Pan on democracy, independence, and life between Beijing and Washington.

The SignalMichael Bluhm