BEIJING (AP) — Taiwan's opposition leader met Friday with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, the first such encounter in over a decade, with both sides affirming the need for maintaining peace around the self-ruled island island China claims as its territory.
Both Xi and Cheng Li-wun, the head of the Beijing-friendly Kuomingtang Party, reiterated they wanted to move toward a peaceful reunification of Taiwan and the mainland,
though it remains unclear how they would achieve it. China hasn't ruled out the use of force and has stepped up its military exercises around Taiwan, sending warships and fighter jets closer toward the island and steadily poaching Taiwan’s few remaining diplomatic allies.
Xi welcomed Cheng and her party's representatives to a round of applause from both sides. “The larger trend of compatriots on both sides of the strait walking nearer, closer, and together will not change. This is a historical necessity. We have full confidence in this,” he said.
"Although people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait live under different systems, we will respect each other and move towards each other,” Cheng said, adding: “We will seek systemic solutions to prevent and avoid war.”
She arrived in Beijing on Tuesday after visiting Shanghai and Nanjing.
Cheng has previously described herself as a promoter of peace between Taiwan and China. She has opposed large increases in Taiwan's defense spending and her party continues to block President Lai Ching-te's special defense budget for arms purchases, including building an air defense system with interception capabilities called the Taiwan Dome.
Taiwan has been governed separately from China since 1949, when a civil war brought the Communist Party to power in Beijing. Defeated Kuomingtang forces fled to Taiwan, where they set up their own government.
Both Xi and Cheng said they would uphold the 1992 Consensus and opposed Taiwan's independence,
The 1992 Consensus is a tacit agreement, never formally enshrined as a document, that Taiwan and China all belong to one China. However, while the KMT said the 1992 Consensus means they belong to “One China” with separate interpretations of what China means, the Communist Party has never acknowledged that.
Cheng said both parties will work to make sure “the Taiwan Strait will no longer be a flash point with the possibility of conflict, and will not become a chess piece played by the outside world."
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Wu reported from Bangkok.
