China’s Xi affirms goal of unification with Taiwan

BEIJING (AP) ― Chinese leader Xi Jinping reaffirmed China’s desire to bring Taiwan under its control in a meeting Monday in Beijing with the honorary head of the island’s ruling party.

Xi’s meeting with Nationalist Party honorary chairman Lien Chan was viewed on both sides as a symbolic gesture aimed a reaffirming warming ties between the former rivals following Xi’s elevation to leader of the ruling Communist Party last year. Once-tense relations have given way to thriving trade, transport, and investment links, although there has been no commitment by Taiwan to political talks that might lead to China’s unification goal.

Xi told Lien that he and other Communist Party leaders who took office in November will continue developing ties and pushing for unification with the island, which China claims as part of its territory.

“The new Communist Party ruling collective will continue to push forward the peaceful development of relations between the two sides and advance the cause of peaceful unification,” Xi told Lien at their meeting at the Great Hall of the People, the seat of the legislature in downtown Beijing.

Xi promised to “pragmatically forge ahead” to achieve new achievements in relations that would enrich residents on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

The meeting is the first between Xi and a leading Taiwanese politician since Xi assumed the party leadership, and comes weeks before he assumes the title of state president at the legislature’s annual session.

Taiwan split from China amid civil war in 1949.

The Nationalists, once bitter Cold War rivals with China’s Communists, support eventual unification with mainland China but only under a still-to-be negotiated framework.