Written by Percy Yixuanchen Yu.
Image credit: TaiwanPlus News/ Facebook.
A Diagnostic Moment
The 10 April meeting in Beijing between Xi Jinping and Kuomintang Chair Cheng Li-wun was always likely to attract easy labels: thaw, breakthrough, betrayal. None is quite right. What happened afterwards makes that even clearer. Taiwan’s defence ministry said it detected 16 Chinese military aircraft operating near the island around the same time Xi was meeting Cheng. Two days later, Beijing announced ten new measures for Taiwan, including eased tourism curbs and steps to facilitate food sales. A week later, a leading Taiwanese business group publicly urged both Beijing and Taipei to keep politics out of trade and tourism. Then, on 22 April, President Lai Ching-te cancelled a planned trip to Eswatini after several African states denied overflight access, in what Taipei described as Chinese pressure.
Taken together, this sequence does not point to a clean turn toward either peace or confrontation. It points instead to a mixed strategy of inducement, coercion, and political signalling. That is why the Xi–Cheng meeting matters less as a settlement than as a diagnostic moment. It reveals that the central question is no longer whether Taiwan will simply be acted upon by Beijing or protected by Washington. The real question is whether Taiwan can convert its own democratic pluralism into strategic agency under simultaneous external pressure.
The timing matters as well. The meeting unfolded while Washington and Beijing were already signalling interest in another summit and while the Trump administration continued to describe China policy in dual registers: strategic competition in security, economic rebalancing in trade. That gives the Xi–Cheng encounter a pre-summit function without making it reducible to Washington. For Beijing, it helps present cross-Strait manageability as part of the broader diplomatic environment. For the KMT, it offers a way to argue that dialogue can establish a local floor of stability before great-power bargaining narrows Taiwan’s room for manoeuvre.
Democratic Subjectivity as a Security Variable
In earlier work on Taiwan’s subjectivity, I argued that Taiwan should not be treated merely as an object of great-power rivalry. That claim now needs a sharper definition. Taiwan’s subjectivity is not a romantic assertion of unconstrained autonomy. It is the capacity of a politically exposed society to make its domestic legitimacy count in the calculations of others. In security terms, this democratic subjectivity has three dimensions: institutional legitimacy, societal authorisation, and external credibility. Together, they help explain why any serious discussion of war and peace across the Strait must begin inside Taiwan’s own political process rather than above it.
Institutional legitimacy comes first. Taiwan’s long-running identity debate has not disappeared, but its operative boundaries are clearer than they were a generation ago. National Chengchi University’s long-term trend data continue to show a durable Taiwan-centred majority, with Chinese-only identification in the low single digits. No major party in Taiwan supports Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formula, and the electorate still clusters around some version of the status quo rather than either immediate unification or a unilateral declaration of independence. That does not eliminate disagreement, but it does establish the terrain on which any cross-Strait opening must now compete.
This is precisely why Cheng’s Beijing trip is politically significant. For Beijing, the meeting demonstrated that communication with Taiwan remains possible even when official channels with Lai’s administration are frozen. It also reinforced a familiar claim: that stability depends on accepting a shared political foundation. For Cheng and the KMT, however, the wager is more complicated. The trip will be judged in Taiwan not by ceremonial warmth alone, but by whether it produces visible and non-humiliating gains—reduced tension, restored tourism, narrower trade restrictions, or at minimum a plausible narrative of lowered risk. A KMT leader in Beijing no longer occupies the same political space as a KMT leader did fifteen years ago. Any party-to-party channel must now be translated back through elections, media scrutiny, coalition politics, and public legitimacy if it is to become durable policy.
Why Domestic Authorisation Matters
That translation problem is especially acute in 2026. Taiwan’s local elections, scheduled for 28 November, will function in practice as a midterm judgment on Lai’s administration and an early sorting mechanism for 2028. The island’s cross-Strait choices are therefore being pulled directly into domestic electoral competition. The clearest example is the stalled special defence package. Lai has proposed roughly T$1.25 trillion in additional spending to accelerate military modernisation and resilience, but the opposition-controlled legislature has delayed it and pushed back with smaller alternatives. This should not be reduced to a crude contrast between softness and toughness. The deeper issue is that in a democracy under pressure, neither deterrence nor dialogue can be politically sustained without internal authorisation.
That is the second dimension of democratic subjectivity. Societal authorisation is what allows a government to carry out security policy through moments of pain, uncertainty, and polarisation. It matters in wartime, but it also matters in the politics of peace. A society can only absorb military reforms, budgetary trade-offs, economic losses, or temporary rapprochement if those choices are perceived as legitimate and collectively bearable. This is where Taiwan’s democracy matters as a strategic variable rather than an abstract value. A polity without broad authorisation may appear armed yet remain brittle. Conversely, a polity that can debate security openly and still maintain political consent possesses a form of resilience that is hard to measure in inventories of ships, missiles, or aircraft alone.
Seen from this angle, Beijing’s post-meeting incentives are as revealing as the meeting itself. The ten measures announced on 12 April were not random concessions. They were calibrated offers aimed at constituencies inside Taiwan—tourism, culture, food, and local business interests. The question is whether such measures can generate support without deepening distrust. The call from Taiwanese business leaders to keep politics out of trade and tourism shows there is still demand for predictability and exchange. But the cancellation of Lai’s Africa trip, and the coercive message surrounding it, simultaneously reinforces suspicion that economic openings and diplomatic pressure are being deployed as parts of the same strategy. That tension is exactly why Taiwan’s internal authorisation matters: outside actors can create incentives, but they cannot determine how Taiwanese society will interpret them.
External Credibility and Material Foundations
The third dimension is external credibility. Taiwan’s democratic subjectivity does not remain inside the island. It also shapes how others assess Taiwan’s staying power, prudence, and value as a partner. Yet this credibility is being tested in a regional environment that is becoming more openly hedged. The latest State of Southeast Asia survey by ISEAS shows respondents narrowly preferring China over the United States if forced to choose. That is not proof of wholesale alignment with Beijing. It is evident that many regional actors prioritise continuity, market access, and low-risk flexibility.
For Taiwan, this means external credibility must increasingly rest on functional value as much as diplomatic sympathy. Semiconductors, industrial training, healthcare, digital infrastructure, and resilient supply chains are not side issues; they are ways of making Taiwan harder to exclude without forcing partners into maximal political gestures. Democratic subjectivity, in this sense, is not inward-looking. It is what allows Taiwan to project reliability without claiming invulnerability.
Yet even that credibility has a material foundation, and here the most neglected variable is energy. Taiwan imported more than 94 per cent of its energy demand in 2024, and official estimates in 2026 put natural gas stocks at only 10 to 11 days of use. In early April, Taipei said it had received assurances over liquefied natural gas supplies after the disruption around the Strait of Hormuz. Analyst on Taiwan Insight has already noted that energy resilience is not just an economic issue but a national security one. This point deserves to be pushed further. A society that cannot keep power flowing to households, industrial facilities, and data centres will find all its strategic choices narrowing in practice. Dialogue without material resilience is fragile. Deterrence without material resilience is incomplete.
That is why the Xi–Cheng meeting should not be read as a self-contained political episode. Its historical importance lies in how clearly it exposes the structure of Taiwan’s predicament. Beijing can combine incentives with pressure. Washington can widen or narrow Taiwan’s strategic room without always moving security and economic policy on the same timetable. Regional partners can hedge. But none of them can bypass the fact that Taiwan now processes external pressure through its own democratic institutions, public debate, and material vulnerabilities. This is not a slogan. It is a governing reality.
The politics of peace across the Strait, therefore, cannot be reduced to elite contact alone. They depend on whether any political force in Taiwan can integrate dialogue, deterrence, diversification, and energy resilience into a line of policy that society itself is willing to sustain. If that line cannot be built, Taiwan will continue to be described by others through their preferred strategic narratives. If it can, then Taiwan’s subjectivity will cease to be an overlooked abstraction and become what it has always struggled to become: a practical capacity to shape the terms on which others must deal with it.
Percy Yixuanchen Yu is the inaugural Visiting Research Fellow at the School of International Studies, Nanjing University. His research focuses on China–U.S.–Taiwan relations, democratic legitimacy, and the strategic implications of Taiwan’s subjectivity.