Cheng Li-wun, the chair of Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), traveled to Beijing at the invitation of Xi Jinping, the CCP’s general secretary and China’s top leader. The visit was widely referred to in Taiwan media as the “Cheng-Xi summit.”
What drew immediate attention was the sequencing. According to Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, Cheng had “expressed her desire for such a meeting multiple times” before the trip was confirmed. The announcement came not from Cheng or the KMT, but from the Taiwan Affairs Office, a Chinese government body that manages cross-strait relations and functions as a propaganda instrument alongside its administrative role. The DPP argued the sequence was deliberate: Beijing wanted the world to see who was driving the agenda.
Cheng framed the visit in terms of continuity and aspiration. She said the trip built on the precedents of former KMT chairs Lien Chan and Ma Ying-jeou, who also traveled to Beijing during their tenures, and described the summit as sending “a message of peace to the world.”
The KMT’s Beijing engagement: a history of concessions, in the ruling party’s telling
Taiwan’s governing Democratic Progressive Party, in a statement posted to its China Affairs Department’s Facebook account on April 5, described the KMT’s record of engagement with Beijing as one defined by consistent capitulation.
The DPP said that across multiple meetings with Chinese officials, KMT leaders had never once stated that “the Republic of China on Taiwan is a sovereign independent state,” and had never publicly challenged China’s posture toward Taiwan. Party officials at every level, the DPP charged, had issued statements that shrank Taiwan’s status and served the CCP’s political objectives.
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The ruling party reviewed what it called the contested history of KMT chair visits to Beijing, describing those trips as “filled with controversy, degradation, and disorder.” The current visit, it said, went further: arranged entirely on Beijing’s terms, announced by the Taiwan Affairs Office before Cheng had made any public statement about it.
The arms budget accusation
The DPP’s sharpest charge was transactional. The party accused the KMT of deliberately stonewalling on arms procurement budgets and blocking negotiations on a Taiwan-U.S. trade agreement — a charge the KMT has not publicly acknowledged — not on principled grounds, but as political payment to Beijing in exchange for access to Xi Jinping.
The DPP said the KMT had obstructed the trade framework in order to demonstrate to Beijing that it could weaken Taiwan’s defense posture and fracture the Taiwan-Washington relationship. The summit invitation, in the ruling party’s telling, was the reward.
“The Kuomintang must stop serving as a united-front pawn and an internal agent of Taiwan’s destruction,” the DPP statement read. “It must not sacrifice Taiwan’s sovereignty, democratic freedoms, and national security for the sake of one party’s interests.”
How Beijing will use the summit, according to a DPP legislator
Cheng Yun-peng, a DPP legislator known publicly as Fan Yun who serves on the legislature’s foreign affairs committee, laid out two specific warnings in a YouTube broadcast before the summit took place.
The first concerned international framing. Cheng Li-wun had claimed that “the one-China policy is the mainstream position of the world.” Fan Yun called this factually wrong and politically dangerous. She cited the 2024 resolution passed by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a cross-party coalition of legislators from democratic countries, which stated that UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, the 1971 vote that transferred China’s seat at the United Nations from Taipei to Beijing, “does not address the question of Taiwan’s representation” and that “the People’s Republic of China has no right to represent Taiwan.” At least ten democratic legislatures have since passed resolutions affirming those same principles, including those of the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Belgium, and the European Parliament.
Beijing, Fan Yun argued, would use the KMT summit to claim the opposite: that Taiwan’s largest opposition party, which controls the legislature, endorses the one-China framework. “They will use this meeting for international propaganda,” she said, “to lock Taiwan back into the one-China framework and erase the breakthroughs Taiwan has achieved internationally in recent years.”
Peace on unequal terms is no peace at all
Fan Yun’s second concern was about what the atmosphere of the summit could do to Taiwan’s public will to defend itself.
She drew a firm line between peace as a genuine political condition and peace as a talking point. Cheng Li-wun’s framing of the visit as a contribution “to peace across the strait and for humanity” was, Fan Yun argued, precisely the kind of language that softens public resolve at the wrong moment: agreeable on the surface, corrosive underneath.
“True peace is peace with equal dignity,” she said. “It cannot be purchased by harming Taiwan’s political identity or by kneeling to accept the so-called 1992 Consensus.” The 1992 Consensus is a formula Beijing uses to assert that both sides acknowledge a single China, with each side free to define it differently. Taiwan’s government rejects the formula as a trap that concedes the premise of unification before talks begin.
Fan Yun’s practical concern was specific. If KMT supporters and ordinary Taiwanese citizens came to believe that a friendly meeting in Beijing constituted a path to peace, they would grow complacent about building the defense capacity that makes deterrence credible. Taiwan needs both economic strength and an asymmetric military capability, she argued: the kind of decentralized, mobile, cost-efficient systems designed to impose costs on an invading force rather than match it head-on.
“This kind of peace, reached by kneeling before the journey has even begun, would trade away the democratic and free way of life we cherish,” she said. Without equal dignity at the table, the peace on offer is not peace at all.