OPINION:
Cheng Li-wun, chairwoman of Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang (KMT), has demonstrated the corrosive folly of aligning with tyrants.
Ms. Cheng visited Beijing in April to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Yet this was no mere meeting between party leaders.
Ms. Cheng all but bowed down to Mr. Xi, demonstrating the worrying cooptation of Taiwan’s largest opposition party by the Chinese Communist Party. In return, Mr. Xi gave his junior partner the full treatment: the Great Hall of the People, the choreographed long handshake, adulation from the propaganda machine and the historic first summit between KMT and CCP leaders in a decade.
Ms. Cheng’s subservience also damaged U.S. interests. She met with Mr. Xi a month before President Trump’s visit to Beijing, handing the CCP a triumphal narrative on U.S.-China relations and Taiwan.
No wonder Ms. Cheng received the cold shoulder during her farcical U.S. visit this month. The most triumphant image her allies could produce was a photograph beside the presidential seal at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, which any tourist can enter for a $20 ticket.
Pro-Beijing outlets in Taiwan flashed it as breaking news: Ms. Cheng had received “exceptional treatment” from the Americans.
The distance between those images — a handshake with Mr. Xi and a photo at the library — is the whole story of her trip, and a warning to the opposition about getting too close to Beijing.
Ms. Cheng spent 15 days traveling across the U.S. She met with legislators from both parties and sat with scholars at the Hoover Institution, the Hudson Institute and the Asia Society.
What she did not get was a single meeting with anyone in the Trump administration — not the State Department, not the National Security Council, none of the officials who decide whether Taiwan gets military support.
Pressed at home, she insisted that some meetings were “confidential.”
In Washington, when the meetings are real, you do not have to keep them secret. Even the scholars declined to play along. After she touted her strategic insight at Hoover, a Stanford fellow noted that the U.S. policy community remains deeply skeptical of Mr. Xi’s peace promises.
Last autumn, Ms. Cheng told German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle that Vladimir Putin “is not a dictator,” but a democratically elected leader, and she blamed NATO’s expansion, not Russian aggression, for the war in Ukraine.
A politician who excuses the aggressor in Europe signals exactly how she would assign blame across the Taiwan Strait.
While Ms. Cheng signals sympathy for authoritarianism abroad, her supporters put it into practice on American soil.
At New York’s Asia Society, a dissident from mainland China bared a shirt reading “Embrace the Communist Party, and Taiwan becomes the next Hong Kong,” pressed Ms. Cheng on the island’s defense — and was hauled out by security as the crowd jeered him.
Days later, in Los Angeles, another Chinese dissident who challenged Ms. Cheng was put in a chokehold and violently dragged from the venue. Ms. Cheng’s security seized his phone and ordered him to delete the footage. The man later released the video and accused the KMT of behaving as brutally as the party it now courts.
This is transnational repression, brought to America during Ms. Cheng’s visit.
Ms. Cheng led months of efforts to stall Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s special defense budget: nearly $40 billion for the missiles, drones and munitions Taiwan needs to deter invasion.
In February, 37 American lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, wrote to warn Taiwanese leaders that the threat had never been higher and that the island democracy must do more to defend itself. You cannot ask the U.S. to underwrite your security while starving your own military and then expect a warm welcome from the people who would have to defend you.
That is the consensus the administration in Taipei understands, and the opposition still resists: Pass the budget, build the technology, fund the deterrent.
The alternative is the choice Ms. Cheng’s trip laid bare. A party can curry favor in Beijing or keep faith with Washington, but it cannot do both. Lean too close to the CCP, and the support that keeps Taiwan free quietly disappears — replaced, if you are lucky, by a photo beside a seal on a library wall.
• Stan Kwiatkowski hosts “Hard News” and “Freedom Is Not Free.” He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex and is a research fellow at the Indo-Pacific Strategy Think Tank and Taiwan National Security Institute.
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