Taipei, Taiwan (CNN) Taiwan Former President Ma Ying-jeou will visit the mainland China Next week, the first such visit by a former Taiwanese leader since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
Ma, a senior member of Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang party, will be in mainland China between March 27 and April 7, his foundation said in a statement on Sunday.
The foundation said he would pay respect to his ancestors in the southwestern province of Hunan, and lead a delegation of Taiwanese students to interact with their counterparts from mainland China in a number of cities.
While the trip is ostensibly a private one, it is peppered with historical symbolism and comes at a time of deepening tensions over Taiwan’s future.
The ruling Chinese Communist Party has never taken control of Taiwan, but it claims the island’s self-governing democracy as its own, and has repeatedly refused to rule out taking it by force.
At the end of the Chinese Civil War, Mao Zedong’s Communist Party took control of mainland China while Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang fled to Taiwan. – With both sides claiming to be the legitimate representative of China in the following decades, until Taiwan’s transition to democracy in the 1990s.
But recent decades have seen increasing links between Beijing and the Kuomintang, a rapprochement that reached its climax during Ma’s administration.
Ma served as Taiwan’s president between 2008 and 2016, during which time he forged stronger economic ties between China and the democratically ruled island but kept Beijing’s reunification push at bay.
His perceived closeness to Beijing, particularly on the economic front, sparked protests and significant voter backlash.
The KMT has lost in recent elections twice to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which is more suspicious of Beijing and rejects the tacit understanding that both sides profess to belong to. “One China” But with different interpretations of what this entails.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has stepped up economic, diplomatic and military pressure on Taiwan since the Democratic Progressive Party took power in 2016.
A historic journey takes place against that frantic geopolitical backdrop and comes in the form of Taiwan and the United States Step up efforts To counter the growing military capabilities of China.
His trip will also come at a politically sensitive time. An official with Taiwan’s Council for Foreign Communities Affairs told lawmakers earlier this month that Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen will soon stop over in the United States on her way to diplomatic allies in Latin America. Speaker of the US House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy also said he plans to meet her when she is in the US.
Taiwan is scheduled to hold its next presidential elections in January next year. Tsai is not eligible for re-election.
Fears of a Chinese invasion It has loomed over Taiwan for more than seven decades, but it has been energetically boosted by Xi and Xi’s increased assertiveness Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The KMT has long refused to be described as a “pro-Beijing” party. But its leadership, including Ma, often prompted the need to improve relations.
Kuomintang Vice Chairman Andrew Hsia visited Beijing Last month To meet with senior Communist Party leader Wang Huning.
In turn, Beijing broke off official contacts with the Taiwan government led by Tsai.
In 2015, Ma Wuxi held a historic event face to face meeting In Singapore – the first meeting between the leaders of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party since the end of the Chinese Civil War, although not on opposite sides of the straits.
Ma said a meeting between Xi and Ma is not currently planned for the trip.
Taiwan’s presidential office said in a statement on Sunday that Ma will be required to report details of his travel itinerary to the government before and after his visit to China.
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