https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/c5cfe176-5ff5-4463-a39b-c5e4a1a0ded8 On 10 April, Chinese President Xi Jinping greeted an eye-catching guest at Beijing's Great Hall of the People: Cheng Li-wun, the newly elected leader of Taiwan's opposition Kuomintang (KMT) party. In one sense, the meeting was hardly unprecedented. Xi himself had met Ma Ying-jeou in Singapore a decade earlier: the first, and so far only, summit between sitting leaders of mainland China and Taiwan. And Cheng's trip largely retraced her mentor Lien Chan's 2005 'journey of peace' to the mainland, during the KMT's previous spell in opposition. By 2026, then, there was already a well-worn protocol for Xi and Cheng to follow. Use party rather than state titles exclusively, to sidestep Beijing and Taipei's rival sovereignty claims. Emphasise the shared rejection of 'Taiwan independence'. Reaffirm the '1992 Consensus', under which both sides understand themselves to be part of one China. Pay obligatory homage to Sun Yat-sen, the KMT founder honoured by both parties as the father of modern China. But for Cheng Li-wun, simply going through these motions was a more radical act than it was for her predecessors. Not just because she herself started out in Taiwan's pro-independence camp. But because China's challenge to unipolar US hegemony, and the West's ideological offensive against it, have escalated to unseen heights in the last decade. And central to that offensive is the insidious claim that Taiwan's people monolithically reject both communism and Chinese identity, to the point of actively desiring US military 'protection'. While Cheng's meeting with Xi may finally be puncturing that narrative internationally, in Taiwan itself it's in full-blown collapse. And that's why her most radical gesture isn't to extend an olive branch to the communists in power on the mainland, as the KMT has done for a generation. It's to atone for her party's brutal repression of Taiwan's own communists, who died for the cause of socialist unification only to be written out of history for decades. By finally laying to rest the ghosts of China's long-frozen civil war on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, Cheng's journey of peace may prove the most meaningful one yet. Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:03:11 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://tankie.tube https://tankie.tube/lazy-static/avatars/3ba3ff73-a8b6-49c9-add8-9653ef090c7f.webp https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/c5cfe176-5ff5-4463-a39b-c5e4a1a0ded8 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://tankie.tube/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.