Just two days after former vice president Lien Chan’s (連戰) office hemmed and hawed about a possible meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on his next trip to China, it yesterday confirmed that such a meeting would take place on Friday next week. While his trip is sure to attract media coverage in China, in Taiwan it should be greeted with a big yawn.
After all, it is hard to keep count of all the times Lien has been to China since his April 2005 trip to meet with then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) — Lien in his role as then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman and Hu as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He has met a succession of leaders, including Xi, so there is really nothing newsworthy about another trip, another Xi tete-a-tete.
While his 2005 trip was a historic meeting of the leaders of the two parties at the center of the Chinese Civil War, it is worth remembering that at the time, Lien had been soundly repudiated, not once, but twice, by the voters of Taiwan — having come in third in the 2000 presidential election and losing again in 2004 — and Lien and the KMT were trying to undercut the Democratic Progressive Party administration of then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).
The ostensible reason for Lien’s latest trip is to pay his respects to his maternal grandparents at a memorial in Shenyang, attend celebrations to mark the 10th anniversary of the Lien Heng Memorial Hall in Hangzhou — Lien Heng (連橫) was his paternal grandfather — and attend a seminar in Beijing on the rejuvenation of the Chinese people.
That the seminar is scheduled for the second day of his nine-day trip, the same day as the meeting with Xi, would seem to indicate that one or the other, or even both, were last-minute inclusions to his itinerary.
As to what — if anything — Lien Chan plans to say to Xi, his office spokesperson would only say that he is willing to contribute anything that would be conducive to cross-strait peace and benefit the livelihoods of Taiwanese.
Ah yes, the livelihoods of Taiwanese, the people for whom Lien Chan supposedly toiled as he had his ticket punched up the ladder of the then-KMT authoritarian era, from minister of transportation and communications to vice premier, to foreign minister, to Taiwan provincial governor, to premier, to vice president. The people who rejected him in his only two outings as a political candidate. The same people whose will he ignored with his petulant outbursts following his defeats in the polls. The same people whose identity and family histories during the Japanese colonial era he denigrated when his son, Sean Lien (連勝文), was running for Taipei mayor in 2014.
However, Lien Chan has often demonstrated his warped view of Taiwanese history and family relations, even his own.
Lien Heng’s 1921 opus, The General History of Taiwan, was written to encourage Taiwanese to value their own heritage, culture and political activism, one that was distinct from, as well as equal to, the history of China. His grandson has been marketing it to the CCP as an anti-Japanese colonial rule treatise, gifting his hosts a copy on his 2005 trip.
The Lien Heng Memorial Hall is on the site of the remains of a more-than-800-year-old Buddhist temple, one that was famed for its printing shop during the Qing Dynasty, and where Lien Heng stayed in 1926 and 1927 while on a research trip. It is no surprise that the CCP would be willing to sacrifice religion and history to present its own propaganda about the hall being a symbol of cross-strait communications and no surprise that Lien Chan would go along with such malarkey.
Lien Chan was reportedly upset that rumors about his upcoming trip leaked this week before a coordinated announcement with Beijing set for Monday. That he was unhappy that Taiwan’s free press learned of his visit before a statement could be issued with Beijing speaks volumes about his values and priorities.
This editorial has been updated since it was first published to correct a misspelling.
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