🇨🇳 🇹🇼 | “Taiwan has never been a country.” KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun is leading a direct offensive against the ruling DPP's separatist trajectory, pushing for improved cross-strait relations with Beijing. The DPP's US-aligned politics have steered the island toward an increasingly dangerous standoff with the People's Republic of China, which has maintained its claim to Taiwan as sovereign Chinese territory since the 1949 civil war, when KMT Nationalists retreated to the island following their defeat by the Communist Party. Washington intervened in 1950, deploying the 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait and freezing what Beijing considers unfinished business. Western governments and media have since worked hard to project a uniform Taiwanese desire for independence, but a 200,000-strong protest in Taipei recently told a different story, with improved cross-strait relations among the central demands. The KMT argues that Taiwanese identity is inseparable from Chinese civilization. The DPP has spent decades building a competing narrative. Washington has spent decades bankrolling it.