Beijing has promised to restore direct flights between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan following a visit by the leader of the main opposition party. The 10-point measures, which also include a pledge to ease restrictions on individuals travelling to the island, were announced on Sunday as Kuomintang chairwoman Cheng Li-wun concluded her visit to the mainland. Her trip, which began on Tuesday, included a meeting with President Xi Jinping – the first between the leaders of the Communist Party and...
The high-profile talks between leaders of the Communist Party and the Kuomintang are a step towards cross-strait stability despite the KMT’s opposition status in Taiwan, according to observers. Communist Party chief Xi Jinping and KMT chairwoman Cheng Li-wun met in Beijing on Friday in the first such talks between the sitting leaders of the two parties in nearly a decade. Analysts in mainland China and Taiwan broadly agreed that the encounter signalled a revival of cross-strait engagement...
Cheng Li-wun, chairwoman of Taiwan’s largest opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), will speak to the press in Beijing at 2pm on Friday, hours after her historic meeting with Communist Party chief Xi Jinping. It was the first meeting between leaders of the two parties in nine years after then-KMT chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu visited the mainland in November 2016. During the meeting on Friday morning, both Xi and Cheng highlighted a message of peace across the strait. “Compatriots on both sides are...
Communist Party chief Xi Jinping met Cheng Li-wun, chairwoman of Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), in Beijing on Friday. Their meeting marked the first time a sitting KMT chairperson had met with the Communist Party leadership since November 2016, when then-KMT chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu visited the mainland. Cheng has described her six-day trip, which began on Tuesday in Shanghai, as a “journey of peace”. During her visits to Shanghai and Nanjing, she repeatedly emphasised...
Taiwanese opposition leader Cheng Li-wun blamed Japanese “imperialist forces” for dividing mainland China and Taiwan, as she paid tribute to Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen at his mausoleum in Nanjing on Wednesday. In a speech delivered after the Kuomintang (KMT) chairwoman laid a floral wreath before a statue of the founder of modern China, Cheng said Taiwan became a Japanese colony at a time of national weakness, following the 1895 defeat of China in the first Sino-Japanese war. She said...
KMT chief Cheng Li-wun, the party's first leader to visit China in a decade, hopes to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.
A high-stakes visit to mainland China by the chairwoman of Taiwan’s main opposition Kuomintang (KMT), during which she is expected to meet Communist Party leader Xi Jinping and promote cross-strait peace, is under scrutiny in Taipei. Cheng Li-wun is set to depart for Shanghai on Tuesday for a six-day trip, with local media reporting a possible meeting with Xi in Beijing on Thursday – the first such encounter between the two parties’ leaders in a decade. However, Cheng’s coming visit has drawn...
The former chairwoman of Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), has called for cross-strait dialogue to break the state of “cold peace”, rebuild trust and avoid conflict. “The key to cross-strait relations lies not in radical confrontation, but in profound mutual trust,” Hung Hsiu-chu wrote on a popular mainland online platform on Thursday. She also called for a return to the 1992 consensus, an unofficial agreement between Beijing and the then-ruling KMT in Taiwan. It states that...