Global headlines in recent months have been dominated by the words and actions of Taiwan’s most imminent threat, KMT Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文).
Despite decades of Chinese intimidation and its military and gray-zone tactics, Taiwan’s largest opposition party, the KMT, and its allies pose a greater danger to the country’s sovereignty.
Cheng came to the spotlight through her handshake with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in April. Although her trip was coined as a “peace tour,” Cheng and her party’s actions have been far from contributing to peace in the Taiwan Strait.
Before going into the specifics of how Cheng has been the opposing force to regional peace, let’s dive who Cheng actually is. She started her political career as a fierce Taiwan independence advocate joining the DPP at 19. She was active in the Wild Lily movement, the largest student protest in Taiwan’s modern democratic history.
Much credit is given to Wild Lily for transforming Taiwan from an authoritarian one-party dictatorship tightly controlled by the KMT to a pluralistic direct liberal democracy. Ironically, Cheng would later join and become the chair of the very party she was vehemently against during Wild Lily.
Known consistently for her firebrand style of verbal attacks, Cheng left the DPP while the party was discussing expelling her in 2002 for making unverified allegations against the then health minister. She then left the country to pursue graduate studies in the UK before returning to join the KMT, the party she fought against for most of her youth in the name of advancing Taiwan’s democracy and independence.
CCP an old friend
Taking a 180-degree turn, Cheng not only gave up on those two goals, but she also accompanied then-KMT Chair Lien Chan (連戰) on a groundbreaking visit to China in 2005. She was part of the first in-person meeting between leaders of the KMT and CCP since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
This trip was viewed by analysts as one of the catalysts of the proxy relationship between the KMT and CCP. A turning point where KMT senior officials would work with, either directly or through guessing the agenda of CCP leaders in Beijing, to carry out their desired outcomes.
Prior to this year’s global headlines depicting Cheng as an alternative “peace maker” in the Taiwan Strait, the KMT chair had already made domestic noise as a legislator by falsely accusing former Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and ex-President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of surrendering to China in a parliamentary debate in 2021.
Four years later, Cheng went on to make global headlines shortly after being elected KMT chair at the end of 2025 for her pro-China stance and high profile visit there.
President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) and the ruling DPP have called out her hypocrisy. Lai has criticized how her siren calls for peace contradict her actions and go against Taiwan building a credible national defense against deterring a potential Chinese invasion.
During an event marking the second anniversary of Lai’s presidency, he called out Cheng’s two-pronged approach of possessing strong defense capabilities and maintaining cross-strait peace with China. He denounced the unfeasible nature of her approach by pointing out how she and her party have worked to block the passage of the defense budget by slashing it to almost half.
Defense cuts
The KMT-led cuts have almost halved the original proposed NT$1.25 trillion (US$40 billion). These cuts would practically kill drone production, low hanging fruit that Taiwan would be capable of easily making without relying on imported articles mainly from the US. Security analysts have stressed, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and most recently, Iran, that such drones and UAVs could prove critical and serve as a key deterrent to Chinese attempts to seize Taiwan by force.
Lai also pointed out how Cheng directly compromised Taiwan’s sovereignty by accepting the fabricated “1992 consensus,” in front of Xi in Beijing. This directly goes against the will of the overwhelming majority of the people of Taiwan.
As Xi has repeatedly defined the “1992 consensus” as “one country, two systems,” her acceptance practically means that she is working toward making Taiwan become another Hong Kong.
Furthermore, not only have Cheng and her party’s actions put severe strains on Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities, her parroting of Chinese propaganda paints a distorted image of Taiwan being inseparable to China. This goes against the reality that both countries are separately governed, unsubjugated to one another, and the fact that Taiwan has never been a part of the People’s Republic of China.
Even Singapore Senior Minister and former-Prime Minister Lee Hsien-loong mentioned during a recent visit to China, that China and Singapore are sovereign separate countries that cooperate based on shared economic interests rather than common ethnic descent. Singapore’s population is overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese, consisting of around 76%.
Trojan horse attack
This is starkly different from the flattering words from Cheng in China, schmoozing CCP leadership by glorifying the greatness of the “Chinese people” on both sides of the strait. She even went further to denounce Taiwan’s most critical regional security partner, Japan, on how it has yet to face its past aggression almost a century ago.
The contradiction does not stop at defaming Japan. What is more amusing is despite constantly spreading US skepticism and blocking the purchase of US defense articles that the US State Department directly called out as “doing China a favor,” Cheng is heading to the US next week. She plans to be on the East Coast for a two-week tour and has made repeated calls to meet with US President Donald Trump. It remains to be seen whether Trump and other senior US officials will agree to hear her out.
What is certain is that Beijing has found a useful “Trojan horse” to amplify its disinformation campaign around defeatism in Cheng. Without proxies like Cheng and her party, communist leaders in China would not be able to effectively wedge its grayzone warfare in dividing Taiwan and diminish the country’s resolve to resist a takeover without firing a single bullet.
This is a critical obstacle that derails Taiwan’s efforts in building a unified force in the fight against Chinese adventurism. That is why such channels could be proven even more dangerous than the enemy itself.
For now, Taiwan’s populace appears to be resilient to Cheng’s disguise, with her latest approval ratings at an all time low of 23% and disapproval at 51% according to the May Formosa Poll.
Rath Wang is a political commentator based in Taipei focusing on Taiwan’s politics, media, civil society, and key issues influencing Taiwan’s future. He is a media producer and host of current affairs talk shows and podcasts and has worked on political campaigns and lived in Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, and the US.
