Beijing: pressure and conciliation

China sent warships and warplanes toward Taiwan while Xi Jinping was sitting down in Beijing with Cheng Li-wun, the leader of Taiwan’s biggest opposition party, and talking about peace across the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan’s government said the contrast was the whole problem: conciliatory words on one channel, military pressure on another. (reuters.com) On April 10, Taiwan’s defence ministry said it had detected 16 Chinese military aircraft near the island in the previous 24 hours, and Reuters reported officials were also tracking a rise in Chinese naval activity. One Taiwanese official said Beijing’s message to Taipei looked less like outreach than “warships and warplanes.” (reuters.com) At the same meeting in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Xi told Cheng he had “full confidence” people on both sides would be united, and he said China would “absolutely not tolerate” Taiwan independence. Cheng answered with the language Beijing wanted to hear most: reconciliation and avoiding war. (aljazeera.com (france24.com)) Cheng is chair of the Kuomintang, the party that once ruled China, lost the civil war to Mao Zedong in 1949, and retreated to Taiwan. That history is why Beijing still treats the Kuomintang as a political bridge even though Taiwan now elects its own presidents and runs its own military, courts, and government. (apnews.com (britannica.com)) The current government in Taipei is led by the Democratic Progressive Party, which Beijing distrusts because the party rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claim over Taiwan. Since Tsai Ing-wen won the presidency in 2016, Beijing has cut off formal high-level contact with Taiwan’s government and leaned harder on military coercion and opposition-party outreach instead. (reuters.com) (cfr.org) That is why this visit was unusual: Cheng was the first Kuomintang leader to go to China in about a decade and the first to meet Xi Jinping in that role in nearly 10 years. Beijing used the meeting to show that it still has Taiwanese partners willing to talk on its terms. (npr.org) (nytimes.com) Inside Taiwan, the meeting landed in the middle of a fight over military spending. Reuters reported Taipei officials were especially unnerved because the Kuomintang has been blocking or slowing parts of a defence increase that Washington has been urging, even as Chinese aircraft and ships keep showing up near the island. (reuters.com) Cheng’s critics say that turns “reconciliation” into leverage for Beijing: talk softly to the opposition, squeeze hard with the military, and make defence spending look like the obstacle to calm. Cheng has pushed back by saying her trip had “no connection whatsoever” to Taiwan’s budget fight. (aljazeera.com) (straitstimes.com) Beijing has used this two-track play before. It isolates Taiwan’s elected leaders, courts business groups and opposition figures, and keeps military pressure high enough to remind everyone that China can raise the temperature whenever it wants. (reuters.com) (cfr.org) So the scene on April 10 was not a contradiction so much as the strategy itself: Xi offered a handshake to one Taiwanese party while the People’s Liberation Army kept circling the island. The point was to separate “good” Taiwanese who accept Beijing’s framework from the government in Taipei that does not. (reuters.com) (aljazeera.com)