Taiwan's main opposition leader, Cheng Li-wun of the Kuomintang Party (KMT), arrived in China on Tuesday for a rare six-day visit that she has called a peace mission.
It comes as China is stepping up military drills around the island, a democracy claimed by Beijing as its own territory, and the U.S. pressures Taiwan to spend billions on American weapons.
Speaking to reporters just before she boarded a plane in Taipei, Cheng stressed the need for dialogue with Beijing.
"If you truly love Taiwan, you will seize every opportunity and every possibility to prevent Taiwan from being ravaged by war," she said. "Preserving peace is preserving Taiwan."
China's State Council's Taiwan Affairs office said the visit will have a "significant" and "positive impact" on maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, according to Chinese state-run news agency, Xinhua.
Cheng and a delegation of other KMT officials will visit the eastern cities of Shanghai and Nanjing before arriving in Beijing, where Taiwan's media is widely reporting she may meet Chinese president Xi Jinping.
It's the first visit of a sitting KMT leader to China in nearly a decade.
"I don't think [the visit] is a very good thing," Wen Wen-fu, a businessman from New Taipei City who was waiting to fly to Shanghai, said right after Cheng's plane took off. "Her party of course is closer to China and the ruling party is more pro-U.S.…the most important thing is to consider the wishes of the more than 23 million people in Taiwan."
Another Taiwanese businessman, Lee Jen-hsing, who is based in eastern China's Kunshan city, was more hopeful. "[Cheng's visit] is definitely a good thing because the two sides of the Strait have always had very close ties," he said.
Beijing paused many of its exchanges with the KMT, as well as most state-level ties with Taipei, after the KMT lost power to Taiwan's current ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 2016.
Beijing considers the DPP and Taiwan's current president, Lai Ching-te, separatists, but "the KMT accepts that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one China," said Xin Qiang, head of the Center for Taiwan Studies at Shanghai's Fudan university.
Though, each side has its own interpretation of what "one China" means.
In recent years, Beijing has stepped up military drills near Taiwan, even encircling the island by land, air and sea last year.
Taiwan's parliament is locked in a bitter debate over the DPP-led government's $40 billion request for additional defense spending, which would in part be used to buy more weapons from the U.S.
Beijing is signaling that deterrence is not the only way to manage tensions and that it is open to dialogue, according to Wen-ti Sung of the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub.
"Beijing will use [the visit] to project this image of how there are still a lot of Beijing-friendly voices in Taiwan," he said.
Meanwhile, President Trump, who plans to meet with Xi in May, has suggested he would be open to discussing future American arms sales to Taiwan with Xi.
Statements like this have led to a decline in trust in the U.S., says Yen Wei-ting, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica in Taipei, providing "a political window for Cheng" as she positions herself as a peacemaker between Beijing and Taipei.
But Chen Fang-yu, a political scientist at Soochow University in Taipei, worries that she's playing into Beijing's "United Front" strategy, which includes welcoming Taiwanese politicians on trips "to emphasize that Taiwan is a domestic or internal matter for China."
Taiwan's government is skeptical the meeting will improve cross-strait ties. Chiu Chui-cheng, minister for Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, reminded Cheng that she can visit China, but she is not authorized to negotiate on behalf of Taiwan's elected government. "Peace can be an ideal, but not a fantasy," Chiu told reporters last week.
Valentine reporting from Taiwan and Pak reporting from Kunshan, eastern China.
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