Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation.
Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending.
Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip.
Photo courtesy of the KMT
“If you truly love Taiwan, you will seize even the slightest chance, every possible opportunity, to keep Taiwan from being ravaged by war,” she said.
“So I would rather believe that all Taiwanese hope this trip will succeed, because we can transform the most dangerous place in the world into the safest place in the world,” she said.
Cheng arrived at Hongqiao International Airport in Shanghai under tightened security and then took a train to Nanjing, home to the mausoleum of party founder Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), who overthrew the last imperial government and founded the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912.
Photo courtesy of the KMT
Late on Monday, Ocean Affairs Council Minister Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) posted a picture on Facebook of Chinese warship deployments around Taiwan — two off the east coast, and one each to the north, northwest and southwest.
“When you depart, you are doing so from within what they see as the ‘Taiwan cage,’” Kuan told reporters yesterday, referring to how China’s military has termed Taiwan’s planned “T-Dome” air defense system and talking about Cheng’s trip.
Amid the ongoing trip to China by Cheng, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) yesterday called for stronger legal scrutiny of Taiwanese political leaders’ exchanges with Beijing.
Photo: Chiang Ying-ying, AP
Taiwanese political leaders should not surrender to China through nonresistance or inaction, Cho said at a legislative plenary session, adding that laws governing exchanges between Taiwanese political leaders and China should be bolstered to safeguard national security.
The Executive Yuan has proposed amendments to the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) that would require lawmakers to disclose information and contacts with Chinese political and military figures.
Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正), addressing the same session, said the KMT chair should ask Beijing to stop sending military aircraft and warships around Taiwan, and instead squarely face the ROC’s existence, democratic values and way of life.
Photo: Cheng Yu-chen, AFP
Cheng should take seriously that China’s ambition to annex Taiwan remains unchanged, and not become a tool of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “united front” tactics to divide Taiwan by following the CCP’s political script, Chiu added.
Cheng’s supporters have framed her advocacy as a matter of survival.
“Cheng’s visit to China is buying time and space for Taiwan by persuading Beijing that there are still people in Taiwan who favor closer ties with China,” KMT Vice Chairman Chang Rong-kung (張榮恭) said in an interview with Bloomberg News.
That “reduces the need for Xi to resort to military means for now,” he said.
“Beijing will likely use the meeting to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle,” Tunghai University political science professor Chang Chun-hao (張峻豪) said.
“She could become a useful tool or pawn for Beijing in conveying messages to the international community,” he added.
Washington has watched the optics with caution since the trip was announced on Monday last week.
US Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who visited Taipei last week, said that while “talking is good,” Beijing should be engaging with Taiwan’s elected leaders, not just the opposition.
Additional reporting by CNA and Bloomberg
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
COUNTERING HOSTILITY: The draft bill would require the US to increase diplomatic pressure on China and would impose sanctions on those who sabotage undersea cable networks US lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bipartisan bill to bolster the resilience of Taiwan’s submarine cables to counter China’s hostile activities. The proposal, titled the critical undersea infrastructure resilience initiative act, was cosponsored by Republican representatives Mike Lawler and Greg Stanton, and Democratic Representative Dave Min. US Senators John Curtis and Jacky Rosen also introduced a companion bill in the US Senate, which has passed markup at the chamber’s Committee on Foreign Relations. The House’s version of the bill would prioritize the deployment of sensors to detect disruptions or potential sabotage in real-time and enhance early warning capabilities through global intelligence sharing frameworks,
RSS