Taiwan’s new opposition leader wants to talk to Xi Jinping

Cheng Li-wun tells The Economist she hopes to meet China’s president early this year

Photograph: Lam Yik Fei/The New York Times)/Redux/eyevine

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R ISK COMES naturally to Cheng Li-wun, Taiwan’s opposition leader. She began her career as a student activist in the 1990s, seeking independence for her homeland and castigating the Kuomintang (KMT), the ruling party at the time. Then she stunned colleagues by joining the KMT. Now, as that party’s new leader, she is making her biggest gamble yet. As China steps up military drills around Taiwan, which it sees as its territory, she is blocking efforts to boost defence spending. She thinks Taiwan’s people should accept that they are Chinese. And she hopes to bring her party back to power by pursuing reconciliation with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.

“The most important task of my tenure is to advance peace across the Taiwan Strait,” she told The Economist in an interview on January 27th. To that end, she revealed that after a nine-year hiatus, the KMT will resume dialogue with China’s Communist Party in early February, starting with exchanges between their think-tanks. She says she hopes to visit China in the first half of 2026 to meet Mr Xi (who sent her a congratulatory telegram after her election in October, expressing hope that they could work together towards unification). “We must stop deliberately vilifying everything related to China,” she says.

Chart: The Economist

It is a controversial strategy, even for some within her party. The KMT lost the past three presidential elections to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which views Taiwan as a separate country. Opinion polls show that a majority of Taiwan’s people distrust China’s government, have little appetite for unification and consider themselves Taiwanese rather than Chinese. Ms Cheng’s platform is also troubling for America, which is committed to helping the island defend itself but insists Taiwan must spend much more on its own armed forces. American officials believe Mr Xi has ordered his generals to be capable of taking Taiwan by 2027.

Yet Ms Cheng, 56, believes that she can help avert an attack—and win round voters by the time of the next presidential election, in 2028. She admits that her views on national identity are out of step with public opinion but blames the DPP ’s efforts to “de-Sinicise” Taiwan. Besides, she believes that national identity will not be the defining political issue of the next few years. “What matters more is cross-strait relations,” she says. “That’s what I believe will truly determine how people vote.”

Her message plays on two main fears. One is that if the DPP wins again in 2028 China’s leadership could lose hope of peacefully unifying Taiwan with the mainland. “Once it holds no expectations for Taiwan, the only way it can resolve or address the Taiwan issue would be through means none of us wish to see,” she says. The other fear is that American support for Taiwan is wavering. She cites President Donald Trump’s demands that Taiwan increase defence spending to 10% of GDP and shift to America 40% of its semiconductor industry, which produces most of the world’s top-end chips. “For many Taiwanese, piecing together this information makes them feel that America is abandoning Taiwan,” she says.

Critics view such talk as scaremongering. Although China has developed formidable capabilities to invade or blockade Taiwan (and often practises doing so), it is far from clear that it could succeed without suffering huge losses and devastating the global economy. Mr Xi has also just purged his military leadership. DPP leaders accuse Ms Cheng of echoing Chinese propaganda and endangering Taiwan’s security by blocking defence spending. Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, has pledged to increase military spending to 5% of GDP by 2030. He has also proposed a $40bn supplementary defence budget this year, mainly for American weapons. Yet both plans are being blocked in parliament by the KMT and its allies, which together hold a majority.

In Ms Cheng’s telling Mr Lai is to blame for not providing more details of his military spending plans. The figure he has proposed “crowds out all other needs”, she says. She declines to specify how much Taiwan should spend on defence, but says it can never match China’s firepower. Instead, she argues Taiwan’s security should be achieved through “reasonable” military spending combined with negotiations with Mr Xi. And she faults Mr Lai for refusing to accept the consensus agreed with China in 1992, when the KMT was in power. That stipulated that both sides of the Taiwan Strait are part of “one China”, while allowing for different interpretations. Because the DPP rejects that formula as legally invalid (and a trap), China has suspended official talks since it came to power in 2016. Embracing the 1992 consensus today “would significantly reduce the likelihood of military confrontation”, Ms Cheng says.

As to the desired outcome of such negotiations, Ms Cheng chooses her words carefully. In meeting Mr Xi, she says her main goal is to secure an explicit public commitment that both sides should work to maintain peace, acknowledging that war would bring “unimaginably catastrophic consequences”. Can he be trusted? To avoid damaging its international image, China must “be true to its word”, she says. “Credibility is paramount.”

For the longer term, she declines to say whether the ultimate goal should be peaceful unification (as a former KMT president has suggested). Within her four-year term, she says it would already be a big achievement to set up a framework for maintaining peace. “As for whether the status quo might change thereafter, I only hope it occurs under circumstances acceptable to people on both sides,” she adds.

Her talk of reconciliation is all the more striking, given her past. Though her father was a soldier in the Nationalist army that fled to Taiwan from the mainland in 1949, she became a student protester who was drawn to the DPP. She left it in 2002, disillusioned by what she saw as corruption and intolerance of dissent within its ranks. Joining the KMT three years later, she quickly earned a reputation as a combative public speaker. But she only recently became more outspoken about her own sense of Chinese identity.

Whether she will be the KMT ’s presidential candidate in 2028 is unclear: she says she is focusing on her current job. But as the party’s chairwoman, she will shape its platform for local elections this November, as well as the presidential vote. Already, she is shaking up Taiwan’s politics in ways that could alter the precarious balance of relations between Taiwan, China and America. The stakes have never been higher. And Ms Cheng is all in. ■

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논증 분석

유형: causal

핵심 주장

Kuomintang 신임 대표 Cheng Li-wun은 Xi Jinping과의 대화를 통한 양안 화해가 대만의 안보를 지키고 2028년 집권을 달성할 수 있는 최선의 전략이라고 주장한다.

논리구조

1. 전제: Cheng Li-wun은 KMT 대표로서 가장 중요한 임무가 양안 평화 증진이라고 규정하며, 9년간 중단되었던 KMT와 Chinese Communist Party 간 대화를 2026년 2월 재개한다고 밝혔다.
2. 진단: DPP가 세 차례 연속 대선에서 승리했음에도 불구하고, 대만 주민 다수가 중국 정부를 불신하고 통일에 소극적이며 스스로를 대만인으로 인식하는 상황에서, Cheng Li-wun은 국가 정체성보다 양안관계가 유권자의 투표를 결정하는 핵심 변수가 될 것이라고 진단한다.
3. 논거: DPP가 2028년 재집권할 경우 Xi Jinping이 평화적 통일에 대한 기대를 포기하고 무력 행사를 선택할 수 있다는 공포감을 활용하여 화해 전략의 필요성을 정당화한다.
4. 논거: Donald Trump 대통령이 GDP의 10% 국방비 지출과 반도체 산업의 40% 미국 이전을 요구하는 상황을 근거로, 미국의 대만 지원이 흔들리고 있다는 인식을 조성해 자신의 대중 화해 노선을 정당화한다.
5. 처방: Lai Ching-te 정부의 400억 달러 규모 추가 국방예산을 KMT 의회 연합을 통해 차단하고, 대신 ‘합리적’ 수준의 국방비와 Xi Jinping과의 협상을 결합한 안보 전략을 제시한다.
6. 처방: DPP가 거부하는 1992년 합의(양안이 ‘하나의 중국’이나 각자 다른 해석을 허용)를 수용함으로써 2016년 이후 중단된 공식 양안 대화를 복원하고 군사 충돌 가능성을 낮출 수 있다고 주장한다.
7. 반론: 비판론자들은 중국이 대만을 침공·봉쇄할 능력을 갖추고 있으나 성공 여부는 불확실하고 막대한 피해를 수반하며, DPP는 Cheng Li-wun이 중국 선전을 반복하고 국방비 차단으로 대만 안보를 위협한다고 비판한다.
8. 결론: Cheng Li-wun은 Xi Jinping과의 회담을 통해 전쟁의 ‘상상할 수 없는 재앙적 결과’를 공개적으로 천명하는 평화 유지 틀을 구축하는 것을 단기 목표로 삼으며, 장기적 통일 여부는 양측 주민이 수용 가능한 조건 하에서 결정되어야 한다는 입장을 유지한다.

결론

Cheng Li-wun의 대중 화해 전략은 대만 내 여론·DPP·미국의 우려에 맞서는 고위험 도박이지만, 그녀는 이것이 대만의 안보와 KMT의 정치적 부활을 동시에 달성할 유일한 경로라고 확신한다.

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