Kuomintang leader Cheng Li-wun’s trip to China could make or break the party’s prospects in upcoming elections, analysts say.

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Taipei, Taiwan – As Taiwanese opposition leader Cheng Li-wun meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing later this week, the Taiwanese public will be watching closely to see how the two leaders discuss Taiwan’s disputed political status, in a make-or-break moment for Cheng’s political career.

The recently elected chairperson of the Kuomintang (KMT) travelled to Shanghai on Tuesday, accompanied by a delegation of party members. Cheng told a media briefing before her six-day trip that she aims to show that Taiwan and China “are not destined for war, nor do they need to remain on the brink of military conflict”.

Cheng’s trip will take her to Nanjing, the capital of China’s eastern Jiangsu province, to visit the mausoleum of Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen – revered on both sides of the Taiwan Strait as the “father of modern China” – before heading to Beijing for her summit with Xi at the end of the week.

President Ma Ying-jeou, also from the KMT, was the last sitting Taiwanese leader to meet with Xi at a 2015 summit in Singapore. However, the pair met again in 2024, when Ma travelled to China as a private citizen.

Cheng’s trip is taking place in a very different context for the KMT as Taiwan’s political landscape has “shifted drastically” over the past decade, according to Sanho Chung, a political scientist at Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University.

Taiwanese nationalism has surged in the years since the Xi-Ma summit 11 years ago, while the KMT’s political power has waned. The party continues to perform well in local elections – thanks to its deep political networks and long history in Taiwan – but it lost the last three presidential elections in 2016, 2020 and 2024 to the centre-left Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

The KMT has long sold itself as the party that can work most effectively with China, but that position has been challenged by the DPP, according to Chung.

Since taking power in 2016, the DPP has offered voters a different diplomatic blueprint, he said, by raising Taiwan’s international profile while strengthening the military. The DPP has also pledged to keep the “door open” to Chinese leaders even after Beijing cut off formal contact with Taipei following the election of President Tsai Ing-wen from the party, he said.

But the past few years have also included a surge in Chinese military activity in the Taiwan Strait – the 180km (112-mile)-wide waterway dividing China and Taiwan – including six rounds of live-fire military exercises since 2022.

The latest drills staged around Taiwan in December 2025 saw Chinese forces practise encircling and blockading the island.

Dialogue or deterrence?

The wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran have left many Taiwanese wondering whether a distracted US, Taiwan’s unofficial security guarantor, would actually help them during a future conflict with China. US President Donald Trump’s mercurial approach to US foreign policy has sown more doubt.

In the face of these concerns, the idea of thawing ties with China still appeals to some voters, said Wen-ti Sung, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. “If Chairperson Cheng can have cordial photo ops with Xi Jinping, the KMT can use that to argue dialogue is more effective than deterrence,” he told Al Jazeera.

Over the next week, Taiwanese voters will be waiting to see how deftly the KMT’s Cheng manoeuvres around all the potential pitfalls underlying Taiwanese engagement with China, said James Chen, an adjunct instructor at Taiwan’s Tamkang University.

Such a diplomatic high-wire act requires Taiwanese leaders to neither fully acknowledge China’s claims over Taiwan, a 23.5 million-people democracy, nor antagonise Beijing, while also potentially keeping the door open to future trade and economic exchange.

Chen told Al Jazeera that if the KMT chair can find her own way of “preserving Taiwan’s sovereignty” in her talks and statements with Xi, “she may win the hearts of Taiwanese voters.

“If she can persuade Xi to prioritise peaceful measures in negotiations with Taiwan, the KMT will benefit politically as well,” he said.

China’s Communist Party (CCP) claims Taiwan, whose formal name is the Republic of China, as a province in a territorial dispute that dates back to the Chinese Civil War, a conflict that roiled China from the 1920s to the 1940s. The CCP has promised to reunite the two by peace or by force in the coming decades.

By one estimate, in recent years, from former US Admiral Philip Davidson, China will be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027.

Despite their deep cultural, linguistic and historic ties to China, most Taiwanese would prefer to remain a de facto independent democracy, according to repeated public opinion polling.

A survey by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation in October 2025 found that only 13.9 percent of respondents supported “unification with China”, versus 44.3 percent who supported independence and 24.6 percent who supported the “status quo” – meaning that Taiwan should remain in the diplomatic grey area as de facto independent.

The DPP opposes Cheng’s trip, which it sees as a public relations win for Beijing, but its concerns are shared by more centrist members of the KMT who are more aligned with the mainstream view on issues like Taiwanese identity, according to Brian Hioe, a non-resident fellow at the University of Nottingham’s Taiwan Research Hub.

Cheng was elected KMT chairperson with the support of the party’s most conservative factions, but moderates fear she will alienate Taiwan’s mainstream voters by appearing too closely aligned with China before local elections in November and the 2028 presidential election, he said.

Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an and Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen will be closely watching Cheng’s meeting with Xi for any missteps, Hioe said, as they both position themselves as contenders for the upcoming KMT presidential ticket.

The Taiwanese public also appears to be dubious on whether the meeting will help or harm the KMT.

A March poll by the platform My Formosa – which conducts monthly political surveys in Taiwan – found that 56.1 percent of respondents believed the meeting would be more harmful than helpful to the KMT’s election prospects this year, versus 21.6 percent who believed it would help.

The Atlantic Council’s Sung said much will come down to the optics of the meeting.

“The level of reception Beijing will give to the KMT delegation will be crucial. A warm reception from Beijing would make Cheng look like an able diplomat, strengthen her hand, and help her consolidate the party behind her,” he told Al Jazeera. “Whereas a lukewarm reception could make the visiting KMT look like a capitulator or accommodationist, and further divide the party.”