With Taiwan gearing up for its most consequential election in decades, its current president and her predecessor traveled to the United States and China respectively, offering contrasting visions of the island democracy’s identity and aspirations.
While President Tsai Ing-wen used her time in the U.S. to rally support for Taiwan’s future as a free society, her predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou, spent most of his maiden voyage to China — the first such trip by a Taiwanese president — talking about the past. On visits to his ancestral village in Hunan province, the Republic of China founder Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum in Nanjing and a cemetery in the ROC’s wartime capital of Chongqing where a Chinese war hero from the second Sino-Japanese War was interned, Ma championed what he sees as the profound historical connectedness between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Despite deep-seated political differences, Ma believes that link should provide a foundation for an enduring cross-strait peace. "People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are (ethnically) Chinese people and are both descendants of the Yan and Yellow emperors," he said in Nanjing.