Cheng Li-wun: From Hunger Strike for Taiwan Independence to Meeting Xi Jinping

1988: A Hunger Strike at the NTU Gate

In the winter of 1988, there was a 19-year-old woman fasting outside the gate of National Taiwan University.

Her name was Cheng Li-wun. Her father was a veteran who had come to Taiwan from Yunnan with the retreating Nationalist army; her mother was a local from Yunlin County.[^1] She had grown up in the Jingzhong No. 3 military dependents' village (眷村) in Tainan, in a household blending mainlander and Taiwanese roots. As a freshman she had joined the newly legalized Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and she called herself a "fundamentalist" supporter of Taiwan independence.[^2]

Her hunger strike that winter was for a man named Huang Hua (黃華). Huang had been charged with "sedition" by the government for advocating Taiwan independence, and Cheng had set up a protest point at the NTU gate, refusing food until the authorities released him. At the time, she thought what she was doing was a pure act of defiance against authoritarianism, a pure fight for independence.

She recalled it later in an interview: she waited for several days, but the people who came to persuade her to leave were not KMT agents — they were from her own party, the DPP. The DPP sent someone to tell her: "Huang Hua is a troublemaker. Leave him alone. Your hunger strike is embarrassing us."[^3]

That was the first time she realized the "Taiwan independence" in her own head and the "Taiwan independence" that the DPP was actually practicing might not be the same thing at all. Thirty-seven years later, on April 10, 2026, she walked into the Fujian Hall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and told Xi Jinping: "People on both sides of the strait are all Chinese."

What happened between the student fasting at the NTU gate and the KMT Chair speaking in Beijing?

30-second overview: Cheng Li-wun, born in 1969 to a Nationalist veteran's family in Tainan, joined the DPP in 1988 and fasted at NTU for the Huang Hua Taiwan independence case, then won a seat in the National Assembly in 1996. She left the DPP in 2002 over the Wu Jui-jen affair, and was recruited into the KMT by Lien Chan (連戰) in 2005. Elected as a legislator three times starting in 2008 and serving as Executive Yuan spokesperson, she hosted the TVBS political talk show Li-wun's Straight Talk (麗文正經話) in 2014-2015. In October 2025 she won the KMT chairmanship with the campaign slogan "I am Chinese," becoming only the second woman ever directly elected to lead the party. Her first months were marked by a public controversy over the 2025 White Terror memorial service that included a Communist spy. On April 10, 2026, she met Xi Jinping in Beijing — the first leader of a major ROC political party to meet the CCP General Secretary in ten years.

How a Top Student Learned International Politics

Cheng Li-wun is not just a student activist with one hunger strike story.

In 1993 she earned an LL.M. in international law from Temple University's Beasley School of Law in the United States.[^4] Then in 2000 she took a second graduate degree — an MSc in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, where she was also a PhD candidate in international relations.[^5] These two degrees quietly shape everything she does later. When she now talks about "a KMT-CCP platform," "a peace framework," "institutional arrangements for preventing war" — she is a person who knows exactly what those phrases mean in an international politics textbook.

From 1996 to 2000, Cheng served four years as a National Assembly representative for Taipei on the DPP ticket. She was also deputy director of the DPP's Youth Affairs Department and deputy convenor of the party caucus in the National Assembly — the classic trajectory of a first-generation post-martial-law student activist moving into the system.

In 2002, a sexual harassment case involving fellow DPP member Wu Jui-jen broke out, and Cheng was dissatisfied with how the party leadership handled it. After her party rights were suspended, she resigned her DPP positions.[^6] That is the formal moment she left the green camp. But her own later explanation was blunter: "I discovered that Taiwan independence had long been a joke, a scam."[^7]

In 2005 she accepted an invitation from Lien Chan to formally join the KMT. A woman in her early thirties, a law master's, Cambridge training in international relations, a former Taiwan-independence hunger striker — that résumé was an anomaly inside the 2005 KMT. Lien Chan wanted that anomaly.

The "Warrior," the Controversies, and a TV Show

After joining the KMT, Cheng served first as the party spokesperson, then as the Executive Yuan spokesperson, and in 2008 entered the Legislative Yuan as an at-large legislator.

Inside the party she acquired a nickname: "the warrior." The reason was simple — her speech was sharp, she was good on political talk shows, she never ducked the camera. The KMT during the Ma Ying-jeou era had slid into a "getting-pummeled" defensive posture, and Cheng was one of the few willing to punch back. When she won the chairmanship, Taiwan's Central News Agency summed her up as "breaking through on the strength of her warrior image."[^8]

But "the warrior" also had its price. In 2005, while serving as director of the KMT Culture and Communications Committee, she named DPP Taichung mayoral candidate Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) as a "corrupt bully" in a campaign ad. Lin sued her under the Election and Recall Law, and the first-instance verdict was three months in prison and one year of civil rights suspension. It was later reduced to one month's detention with a suspended sentence.[^9] Another incident involved her violating KMT internal rules by hosting a radio program for more than the four-hour weekly cap on external jobs. Neither controversy was fatal, but together they left her career with the same stubborn tag: "She can fight, but she often crosses the line."

In 2014-2015 she hosted Li-wun's Straight Talk (麗文正經話) on TVBS.[^10] That show fixed her political style for good: direct, sharp, one-line takedowns, pinning opponents to the wall in a single sentence. This style is directly tied to how she later won the KMT chair — not through organization, not through local factions, but through talking.

On October 18, 2025, the results of the KMT's 12th chairmanship election came in. Cheng defeated former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) and sitting legislator Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) with roughly 50% of the vote in a four-way race, becoming only the second woman ever directly elected to lead the party — the first was Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱).[^11]

The campaign's decisive slogan was six characters long: "I am Chinese." (我是中國人)

From Fasting for Independence to "I Am Chinese"

This is the hardest part of Cheng Li-wun to understand.

Her own version goes like this: when she was young, she thought Taiwan independence was a path of justice, but once she was inside the system she discovered that the DPP's definition of "independence" contradicted itself — declaring independence with the mouth while institutionally never pushing for it. She calls this gap "a scam,"[^12] and at her harshest, "Taiwan-independence fascism."[^13] She insists her political position has not changed; what changed was her judgment about who is telling the truth.

The opposing version goes like this: Cheng went from an idealistic student activist to someone whom Lien Chan's generation of old KMT hands systematically "reshaped" into a Beijing-friendly operator. Every one of her anti-independence declarations was a rung on the ladder to the next position. That she could sit in the Fujian Hall of the Great Hall of the People in 2026 and speak with Xi Jinping is the final product of that remodeling.

Both versions have evidence, and both have blind spots.

The blind spot in the first version: if the judgment that "Taiwan independence is a scam" came from honest experience, why did it just happen to lead to "joining the other party that happened to welcome this judgment"? Pure epistemological conversion does not coincide that perfectly with a career path.

The blind spot in the second version: inside the KMT, Cheng did long belong to a faction that older blue-camp figures saw as too radical, even disobedient. Her line is not a carbon copy of the standard KMT line — it is a distinct sub-line with its own logic. Saying "the KMT could have slotted any stand-in into that role" is not accurate; she does have her own political instincts.

The truth is probably somewhere in between. A person with academic training, debate skills, and ambition for influence could not find her place inside the green camp in early-2000s Taiwan, so she walked to the blue camp — and the blue camp happened at that exact moment to need a "can-speak, credentialed, with-student-activist-background" figure to change its image. Both sides locked into place. That is not betrayal, and it is not pure ideological conversion. It is a political worker choosing the path that is most useful to her and can still be rationalized from the inside.

But the price of that choice: she has to keep walking toward Beijing, or else the choice starts to lose its internal logic. From "independence is a scam" to "I am Chinese" to "people on both sides of the strait are all Chinese" — she cannot stop in the middle.

The White Terror Memorial and Wu Shih's Photograph

If one event crystallizes that dynamic, it is the White Terror memorial service in November 2025.

Less than three weeks after winning the KMT chairmanship, Cheng attended the "1950s White Terror Autumn Memorial Service," organized by the Taiwan Political Victims Mutual Aid Association. Among the names on the memorial list was one called Wu Shih (吳石).[^14]

Who was Wu Shih? He was the former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Republic of China Ministry of National Defense, executed by firing squad at the Machangding execution ground in Taipei in 1950. His crime: espionage for the Chinese Communist Party. He was a high-level CCP intelligence operative embedded in Taiwan, code-named "Secret Envoy No. 1," who passed intelligence to the mainland before and after the Nationalist retreat to Taiwan in 1949. He is historically accepted — even by the PRC itself, which later publicly recognized him and listed him as a "revolutionary martyr" — as a Communist spy.

The autumn memorial service Cheng attended placed Wu Shih on the same commemorative list as other "White Terror victims," and played the Chinese red revolutionary song Song of Rest (安息歌) at the venue. The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) response afterwards was sharp: it called this "whitewashing those who betrayed the country and sold out their comrades-in-arms into a tragic case of fratricide between the two sides of the strait," and "one of the most serious insults to the dignity of the nation."[^15]

Cheng's response came in two parts. First, denial: she said she had not known in advance that Wu Shih was on the memorial list; she had attended a "White Terror memorial," not a "commemoration for a Communist spy."[^16] Second, an expansion: she invoked her own youth fasting for Huang Hua, and argued that the tragedies between the two sides of the strait should be placed within a shared historical narrative — the language of "grand historical reconciliation."[^17]

But it is the second part that is the real controversy. When a "national security discourse" places a treasonous intelligence operative and ordinary citizens wrongfully imprisoned by their own government in the same commemorative ritual, history gets rewritten. It turns a story about an authoritarian regime repressing its own people into "a tragedy of civil war between Chinese people." That rewriting is not a small thing — it shifts the Republic of China's victims from being "Taiwanese" into being "Chinese."

The MAC's criticism was not "you shouldn't commemorate the White Terror." It was "you recast the White Terror from a native Taiwanese trauma into a Chinese civil war narrative." That is a repositioning of identity.

This event and the sentence at the Cheng-Xi meeting five months later — "people on both sides of the strait are all Chinese" — are the same narrative showing up in two different settings.

April 10, 2026: The End of the Arc, or the Midpoint

On the afternoon of April 10, 2026, Cheng Li-wun walked into the Fujian Hall of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and met with Xi Jinping for about ten minutes.[^18] She presented five proposals, the most noted of which was "to institutionalize the peaceful development of cross-strait relations and gradually achieve a 'peace framework.'" Xi's reply was: "People on both sides of the strait are all Chinese, one family."[^19]

Cheng herself called the trip a "peace journey." According to an NPR analysis, her strategy was to capitalize on Taiwanese uncertainty about the Trump administration and to position the KMT as "hedging, middle-path" on cross-strait policy.[^20] Song Wen-ti (宋文笛), a fellow at the Atlantic Council, noted that what Cheng calls "institutional arrangements for preventing war" translates in policy terms to "slowing down defense buildup and reducing U.S. arms procurement."

After the meeting, the Mainland Affairs Council summed up her performance in one sentence. MAC Deputy Minister Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑), visibly tired, said: "We repeatedly asked Chair Cheng to present the three core demands of the Taiwanese people to Xi Jinping — acknowledge the existence of the Republic of China, respect the will of the Taiwanese people, stop the military harassment of our airspace and waters. She did not raise a single one."[^21]

There is an absurd symmetry to this moment.

In 1988 at the NTU gate, Cheng Li-wun fasted to force the government to release a Taiwan independence advocate facing sedition charges. At that time, "the government" meant the authoritarian regime. In 2026 in the Fujian Hall in Beijing, she sat across from Xi Jinping and did not speak up for a single Taiwanese person currently detained by Beijing — not for Taiwanese political prisoners inside China, not for Taiwanese writers rendered to the mainland for trial, not for Taiwanese academics harassed abroad. She was no longer protesting. She was in dialogue.

Except this time, across the table sat a power much larger, and much less constrained by due process, than the one she fasted against in 1988.

Ending: Both Cheng Li-wuns Are Real

Some say the Cheng Li-wun who fasted in 1988 is already dead, and the person nodding across from Xi Jinping in Beijing is an entirely different human being wearing the same name.

Others say the two Cheng Li-wuns are the same person — she has always been doing what she thinks most effectively shakes "the existing structure." In 1988, she challenged the authoritarian KMT. In 2026, she challenges the DPP's independence narrative. The tool changed; the posture did not.

Both arguments have merit. But there is perhaps a third reading: the 1988 Cheng Li-wun and the 2026 Cheng Li-wun are both real, and they are both products of the same Taiwanese society at different stages. An island just emerging from martial law produced a young woman who fasted for Taiwan independence. An island looking for its footing under the shadow of China's rise produced a middle-aged politician who talks about a "peace framework" in Beijing. Cheng Li-wun did not change — the shape of the Taiwan question changed.

But this reading has its own cruel edge: if Cheng Li-wun is the product of "changes in the shape of the Taiwan question," then the success of her path means the shape has already been moved toward exactly the direction she once fasted against.

So the real question is not "did Cheng Li-wun change?" It is: did Taiwan change?

Related reading:

• The 2026 Cheng-Xi Meeting: Ten Minutes of the KMT-CCP Leaders Reunited After Ten Years — the current endpoint of Cheng's trajectory, with the full Beijing scene and the aftermath back in Taipei (EN version pending)
• Taiwan Strait Crises and Cross-Strait Relations — the historical structure ten years before and after Cheng's path, the invisible forces pulling this person toward Beijing
• Taiwan's Political Landscape and Electoral System — why "I am Chinese" could become a winning slogan for the KMT chairmanship. The answer is in the party-member demographics baked into the election rules
• Taiwan's Democratization — the year Cheng fasted was year one after martial law ended. To understand her starting point you must first understand the youth culture of those first five democratic years
• Ko Wen-je — another politician who crossed camps (green-to-blue, or white-to-blue). The two trajectories rhyme but do not match
• Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) — another archetype of a woman politician on the same 2026 stage, with a completely different path and a different vision of Taiwan (EN version pending)
• Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) — the "party chair + legislative speaker" dual structure of the KMT in 2025-2026, Cheng in the party and Han in the legislature (EN version pending)

References

[^1]: Cheng Li-wun - Chinese Wikipedia — Chinese Wikipedia records Cheng Li-wun as born on November 12, 1969, in Kouhu Township, Yunlin County, with a father who was a Nationalist veteran from Yunnan and a mother from Yunlin; her family background is the Jingzhong No. 3 military dependents' village in Tainan.

[^2]: Cheng Li-wun - Wikipedia — English Wikipedia documents Cheng Li-wun's participation in the Wild Lily student movement during her university years, her early Taiwan-independence advocacy, and the extent of her involvement in DPP party affairs as a student.

[^3]: Who is Cheng Li-wun? Her Biography, Career, and Story - KidsMedia — KidsMedia's profile tracking Cheng's political evolution, including the 1988 Huang Hua hunger strike at the NTU gate, the DPP's effort to persuade her to withdraw, and the key inflection points of her green-to-blue journey.

[^4]: Cheng Li-wun - Wikipedia — English Wikipedia records her academic résumé: an LL.M. in International Law from Temple University Beasley School of Law (USA) in 1993, and an MSc in International Relations from the University of Cambridge in 2000 while pursuing a PhD.

[^5]: Who is Cheng Li-wun? - Taipei Times — Taipei Times' November 2025 in-depth profile after Cheng won the KMT chairmanship, detailing her Anglo-American legal training, her PhD candidate status in International Relations, and her overseas education.

[^6]: Cheng Li-wun - Chinese Wikipedia — Chinese Wikipedia documents Cheng's 2002 departure from the DPP over the Wu Jui-jen sexual harassment case handling dispute and her critical stance toward the DPP leadership's handling of such cases.

[^7]: Reaffirming Her Voluntary Departure: Cheng Li-wun Says Taiwan Independence Was Long a Joke, a Scam - Liberty Times — Liberty Times' interview with Cheng on why she left the DPP, directly quoting her original words "Taiwan independence is long a joke, a scam" — first-hand material for her self-narrative.

[^8]: Cheng Li-wun Breaks Through on Warrior Image: Green Camp Origin Elected KMT Chair - Central News Agency — CNA's compiled background on Cheng's KMT chairmanship win, documenting the origin of the "warrior image" label and how her DPP-to-KMT trajectory shaped her positioning in the blue camp.

[^9]: Cheng Li-wun - Baidu Baike — Baidu Baike records the complete judicial history of Cheng's 2005 conviction under the Election and Recall Law for a campaign ad against Lin Chia-lung while she was director of the KMT Culture and Communications Committee, including the three-month sentence with one-year civil rights suspension and subsequent reduction to a one-month detention with a suspended sentence.

[^10]: Cheng Li-wun - Wikipedia — English Wikipedia records Cheng's period hosting the political talk show Li-wun's Straight Talk (麗文正經話) on TVBS cable network from 2014 to 2015, and the show's style positioning.

[^11]: Cheng Li-wun Breaks Through on Warrior Image - Central News Agency — CNA's election-night report on the October 18, 2025 KMT 12th chairmanship election, in which Cheng defeated Hau Lung-bin and Lo Chih-chiang with approximately 50% of the vote, becoming only the second woman ever directly elected to lead the party.

[^12]: Cheng Li-wun Reveals Why She Left the DPP: I Discovered Taiwan Independence Was a Lie - China Times — China Times' 2021 interview with Cheng documenting her public explanation for leaving the DPP and her original words that "Taiwan independence is a lie," a baseline datapoint for her long-term self-narrative on political positioning.

[^13]: United Daily News Interview: Cheng Li-wun — Taiwan Independence Is a Scam, the Blue Camp Must Rise - United Daily News — UDN's profile interview during the 2025 KMT chairmanship race, documenting Cheng's sharper "Taiwan-independence fascism" formulation and her proposed realignment of the KMT line.

[^14]: Cheng Li-wun Criticized for Attending White Terror Memorial That Honored Communist Spy; MAC: Serious Damage to National Dignity - Economic Daily News — Economic Daily's record of the November 2025 controversy around Cheng attending the "1950s White Terror Autumn Memorial Service," whose commemorative list included Wu Shih, the CCP intelligence operative executed at the Machangding execution ground in 1950.

[^15]: KMT Chair Cheng Li-wun's Commemoration of a Former Traitor-Spy — MAC Formal Position - Mainland Affairs Council Official Website — The Mainland Affairs Council's official press release directly criticizing Cheng for "whitewashing those who betrayed the country and sold out their comrades-in-arms" into "a tragedy of civil war between the two sides of the strait" — the government's first-hand statement of position.

[^16]: Attending the White Terror Memorial, Cheng Li-wun: I Did Not Know the List Included Communist Spy Wu Shih in Advance - PTS News — PTS News records Cheng's direct response to the memorial service controversy, in which she claimed she had not known the list included Wu Shih in advance, insisting the event was a "White Terror memorial" and not a "commemoration for a Communist spy."

[^17]: Cheng Li-wun: The White Terror Memorial Is Not Primarily About Wu Shih - Central News Agency — CNA's record of Cheng's further clarification after the memorial controversy, in which she argued that Wu Shih, Zhu Feng, and similar figures fell outside her definition of "political prisoners" and called on all sides to focus on the historical record.

[^18]: Cheng-Xi Meeting Concludes: Cheng Li-wun Presents Five Proposals Including Expanding Taiwan's International Space - Central News Agency — CNA's on-site record of the April 10, 2026 Cheng-Xi meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, including the full text of Cheng's five proposals and meeting duration — first-hand official wire-service documentation.

[^19]: Cheng-Xi Meeting: Xi Jinping's Full Address Revealed, with Conditions on Cross-Strait Peaceful Exchange - Newtalk News — Newtalk News published Xi Jinping's full address at the Cheng-Xi meeting, recording the original phrase "people on both sides of the strait are all Chinese" along with the precondition "uphold the 1992 Consensus, oppose Taiwan independence."

[^20]: China's Xi meets Taiwan opposition leader ahead of key summit with Trump - NPR — NPR's in-depth analysis citing Asia affairs analysts' read on Cheng's strategy in visiting the mainland: capitalizing on Taiwanese anxiety about the Trump administration to position the KMT as "hedging, middle-path" on cross-strait policy.

[^21]: MAC: Cheng Li-wun Raised None of the Points We Asked Her to Raise, Instead Echoed the Other Side Throughout - ETtoday — ETtoday's record of MAC Deputy Minister Liang Wen-chieh's direct commentary after the Cheng-Xi meeting: Cheng Li-wun did not raise any of the three core demands of the Taiwanese people (acknowledge the ROC, respect the will of the Taiwanese people, stop military harassment), underscoring the gap between the meeting's outcome and public expectation.