Taiwanese media report that Kuomintang (KMT) Chairwoman Zheng Liwen, who is currently visiting mainland China, will meet with Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping on Friday (April 10).
The pro-Blue China Times News Network cited sources on Thursday, reporting that the “Zheng-Xi Meeting” will be held on Friday morning.
Similarly, the pro-Blue TVBS News Network also reported on Thursday that the Zheng-Xi Meeting has been confirmed for Friday and that the mainland’s Taiwan Affairs Office will arrange for the relevant security checks for the media on Thursday.
TVBS News Network quoted an anonymous KMT source revealing that the Communist Party already has certain standard procedures and arrangements for meetings between the two leaders. For example, the 2024 “Ma-Xi Second Meeting” between Ma Ying-jeou and Xi Jinping was also held on April 10; the meeting time is also the same as when then KMT Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu met with Xi in 2016—both were at 4 p.m. The schedule for the Zheng-Xi Meeting is expected to follow suit, but last-minute changes cannot be ruled out.
According to related procedures, Zheng Liwen and Xi Jinping will meet at the Great Hall of the People, shake hands, and exchange greetings. Both sides will then give speeches before moving on to a closed-door meeting. The KMT is also planning to hold a press conference afterward for interviews and questions from the media.
On Thursday morning, Zheng Liwen will continue her visit in Shanghai, where she is expected to visit Yangshan Port, a must-see for KMT political figures, as well as the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China; at noon, she will have lunch and give remarks with Taiwanese businesspeople, and in the afternoon, she will head to Beijing.
Prior to this, on Wednesday, Zheng Liwen visited the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing and delivered a speech, skillfully mentioning the “Republic of China” and the “1992 Consensus,” and made a rare lengthy comment on the history of Japanese colonization in Taiwan. She also brought up the “February 28 Incident,” which involved the KMT’s military suppression of the people of Taiwan.
On the same day in Nanjing, Zheng Liwen met with Xin Changxing, Secretary of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, and then took the high-speed rail to Shanghai, where she visited Meituan and the Binjiang Industrial Zone. Taiwanese media reported that in the evening she met with Chen Jining, Secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee, and the two discussed Shanghai’s special status in cross-strait interactions and relations, especially recalling the historic 1998 meeting in Shanghai between mainland Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) President Wang Daohan and Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) Chairman Koo Chen-fu.