China’s Xi touts ‘great rejuvenation’ during Taiwanese opposition leader’s visit

Beijing will spare no effort to promote peaceful relations across the Taiwan Strait, the Chinese president has said

China’s President Xi Jinping met with the head of Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), on Friday and stressed that no global changes would stop “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” including its people across the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan de facto became a self-governed territory after Chinese nationalist forces lost in the civil war against the communists and fled there in 1949. Beijing considers the island an inalienable part of its territory under the One China principle, which the overwhelming majority of UN member states adhere to.

The opposition leader arrived on the mainland on Tuesday at Xi’s invitation. Taiwan’s ruling DPP condemned the visit, but Cheng Li-wun described it as a peace-building mission – the first such event in a decade.

Read more

“Hopefully… the Taiwan Strait will no longer be a geopolitical flashpoint and will never be a chessboard for interference by external forces,” she said, as cited by the Taipei Times.

“We welcome any proposals conducive to the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations and will spare no effort to advance any endeavors that promote such development,” Xi said in a speech at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, adding that forces promoting “Taiwan independence” were the primary instigators of tensions in the region.

“No matter how the international landscape and the situation across the Taiwan Strait may evolve, the overarching trend toward the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will not change,” Xi said.

Read more

Cheng agreed that both the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party should uphold the ‘1992 Consensus,’ under which Taipei and Beijing acknowledged that there is only one China. Taiwanese leader Lai Ching-te’s DPP has opposed the consensus, viewing it as limiting the island’s autonomy.

Cheng’s rapprochement visit comes ahead of an expected summit between Xi and US President Donald Trump, which was earlier postponed due to Washington’s war on Iran.