Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Cheng Li-wun/Facebook
INTERNATIONAL COVERAGE has zoomed in with disproportionate focus on a trip to China by current KMT chair Cheng Li-wun, during which she will meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping. The trip is touted as a visit to China, as the first trip of its kind in ten years, by an opposition leader.
Indeed, that much is true, but a great deal of international coverage has failed to note how Cheng’s trip is not as unusual as it may seem. There has indeed been no meeting between any KMT chair and the Chinese president in ten years. But of the last six KMT chairs who were not temporary acting chairs, four had traveled to China and met with Xi Jinping. The only two who did not on some occasion were Wu Den-yih, who was too weak as chair to be of significance, and Johnny Chiang, who had attempted to carve a space for himself as a pro-reform party leader but also indicated that he would be willing to travel to China to meet with Xi. Chiang, too, did not have staying power as KMT chair.
The last KMT president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, has met with Xi on two occasions. The first was during his second presidential term, with the meeting occurring on ostensibly neutral ground in Singapore. The second time was in 2024, during what was framed as a trip to China for a student exchange.
In this sense, international media may not always have a sense of the extent to which Cheng is a controversial figure in Taiwan, with anticipation that the trip could in fact broker peace or represent something groundbreaking. For one, while it is true that tensions across the Taiwan Strait are higher than a decade ago, any meeting between a KMT chair, who is not simultaneously the president of Taiwan, and a Chinese president represents neither a shift in formal government policy nor a shift in the viewpoints of the Taiwanese electorate.
Indeed, in this sense, the 2015 Ma-Xi meeting was more consequential, seeing as it was a meeting between two heads of state–even if framed as a meeting between the leaders of two political parties with a special historical relationship. At the time, there was speculation that the KMT would seek to supersede the 1992 Consensus with a “2015 Consensus”. After all, a meeting between the KMT and CCP party leaders far exceeds the meeting between the government-run but officially non-government entities of the Straits Exchange Foundation and Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits. Yet this did not occur in 2015 and is less likely to occur now, with Cheng’s trip.
Cheng has, however, stoked controversy on numerous occasions. She has done this through controversial comments, including that she one day hopes to see Taiwanese proud to be Chinese, or stating in an interview that Russia was only fighting a defensive war against Ukraine, which provoked it by getting too close to NATO. The suggestion was that Taiwan could, similarly, provoke China by getting too close to the US. Cheng, too, has appeared at ceremonies memorializing spies executed by the KMT for covert work on China’s behalf during the authoritarian period.
Indeed, controversy regarding Cheng is such that more moderate voices in the KMT are likely to break off from her. This will be especially true of potential presidential hopefuls, who will aim to depict themselves as more moderate than Cheng on cross-strait relations to appeal to the broader electorate, such as Taichung mayor Lu Shiow-yen and Taipei mayor Chiang Wan-an.
In this sense, even as the DPP has publicly decried Cheng’s visit and called for greater regulation on when Taiwanese politicians travel to China, Cheng has, in all probability, given them a gift. As the KMT seeks to allege that the DPP is unfairly framing it as pro-China, the spectacle of Cheng going to China, meeting with Xi, and declaring support for the 1992 Consensus will ultimately benefit the DPP, in seeming to prove the DPP’s point.
It is further important to note that the 1992 Consensus has become an increasingly toxic political brand in Taiwan, to the extent that even KMT presidential candidates have been reluctant to endorse it out of the gate on the campaign trail. This was quite visible with 2024 presidential candidate and New Taipei Hou You-yi, who waffled on the issue for months through formulations such as that he respected Ma Ying-jeou’s advocacy of the 1992 Consensus but was reluctant to initially endorse the 1992 Consensus himself. It was probably not to Hou’s benefit when he eventually did, in fact, come out in favor of the 1992 Consensus, so as to win over critics in the party, but alienating the moderates that he was hoping to appeal to.
To date, Cheng has already started to hit out at the usual suspects. Making her first major public address in China at the Sun Yat-Sen Mausoleum, Cheng hit out at despotic Western civilization, while framing Asian civilization–as embodied by China–as inherently peaceful. At a time when the DPP, KMT, and CCP alike contend over the historical legacy of the Pacific War, with Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te stating that it shows the fate of annexationist powers in the region even if avoiding singling out Japan, Cheng’s solution to the quandary is to claim that Japan is an example of an Asian power that became unduly affected by western influence.
In the meantime, the DPP is likely to focus fire on if regular Chinese military activities surrounding Taiwan occur during Cheng’s visit, seeming to undercut her claim to be able to reduce tensions across the Taiwan Strait. Any failure to mention the ROC or express views that reflect the CCP, rather than the ROC view of history, is likely to face attack as well.