Xi meets Taiwan opposition leader

Xi Jinping sat down with Taiwan opposition leader Cheng Li-wun in Beijing on April 10, and that alone made it a headline: she is the first sitting leader of Taiwan’s main opposition party to meet Xi in more than a decade. Chinese state media showed the meeting at the Great Hall of the People, with senior officials including Wang Huning and Cai Qi in the room. (gov.cn) Xi used the meeting to say China would “absolutely not tolerate” Taiwan independence and to repeat that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are Chinese. Cheng answered with the language of peace and reconciliation, saying she wanted dialogue to lower the risk of conflict. (reuters.com) (aljazeera.com) Cheng leads the Kuomintang, the party that ruled Taiwan for decades after losing the Chinese civil war in 1949 and retreating to the island. Today the Kuomintang argues that regular contact with Beijing is safer than constant brinkmanship, even while it says Taiwan should keep its own government and armed forces. (reuters.com) (npr.org) Taiwan’s current president, Lai Ching-te, comes from the Democratic Progressive Party, which Beijing distrusts far more than the Kuomintang. Lai said on April 7 that he was still open to talks with China, but he also said Taiwan had the right to choose its own future. (reuters.com) That split inside Taiwan is why this meeting was never just about one handshake in Beijing. Xi was speaking to two audiences at once: Taiwan voters, who will choose a president again in 2028, and the government in Taipei, which Beijing wants to isolate by dealing directly with friendlier rivals. (nytimes.com) (cnbc.com) The timing sharpened the message. Cheng began her China trip on April 7 as Taiwanese officials were publicly detailing Chinese warships operating around the island, so her “peace mission” landed against a backdrop of military pressure, not calm diplomacy. (reuters.com) Back in Taipei, her trip also collided with a bruising domestic fight over defence spending. Taiwan’s defence ministry said on April 2 that delays in the budget threatened about T$78 billion, or roughly $2.44 billion, in weapons purchases, maintenance and training, and Cheng’s party was already under fire for skipping key defence talks. (reuters.com 1) (reuters.com 2) There is an older script here too. The last time Xi met a major Taiwan figure from the Kuomintang at this level was the 2015 Singapore meeting with then president Ma Ying-jeou, the first leader-to-leader encounter across the strait since 1949. Beijing is reviving that image now: not tanks and missiles on camera, but a conference table, red carpets and the promise that talking is still possible. (britannica.com) (apnews.com) That does not mean Beijing softened its position. In the same meeting where Xi talked about peace, he tied peace to rejecting independence on Beijing’s terms, which is why critics in Taiwan saw Cheng’s visit as politically useful for China even if it lowered the temperature for a few days. (theguardian.com) (aljazeera.com) So the real story is not that Beijing suddenly found a new partner in Taiwan. It is that Xi used one rare meeting on April 10 to show he can pressure Taiwan with warships, court Taiwan with ceremony, and force the island’s parties to argue over which threat is bigger. (reuters.com) (nytimes.com)