Cheng Li-wun
1988: A Hunger Strike at the NTU Gate
In the winter of 1988, a 19-year-old female university student was on a hunger strike at the gate of National Taiwan University.
Her name was Cheng Li-wun. Her father was a Yunnan-born veteran who came to Taiwan, and her mother was a local from Yunlin. [^1] Raised in the Tainan Jingzhong Military Dependent's Village, she grew up in a mixed family of second-generation mainlanders and native Taiwanese. As a freshman, she joined the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which had only recently emerged after the lifting of martial law, and described herself as a "fundamentalist" supporter of Taiwan independence. [^2]
The hunger strike was for a man named Huang Hua. Huang had been charged with "sedition" by the government for advocating Taiwan independence. Cheng set up a station at the NTU gate, refusing to eat, demanding that the authorities release Huang. At the time, she believed she was doing something pure — resisting authoritarianism and fighting for independence.
She later recalled in an interview that after waiting for several days, the people who came to persuade her to stand down were not KMT agents — they were from the DPP. Party representatives told her: "Huang Hua is a troublemaker. Stay out of it. Your hunger strike is embarrassing the party." [^3]
This was the first time she realized that the "Taiwan independence" in her mind and the "Taiwan independence" 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: "Compatriots on both sides of the strait are all Chinese."
What happened between the hunger-striking college student and the KMT chair speaking in Beijing?
30-second overview: Cheng Li-wun, born in 1969 in a military dependent's village in Tainan, joined the DPP in 1988 and staged a hunger strike at the NTU gate over Huang Hua's sedition case. She was elected as a National Assembly representative in 1996, left the DPP in 2002 over the Wu Jui-jen incident, and was recruited into the KMT by Lien Chan in 2005. From 2008 onward she served three terms as a legislator and as Executive Yuan spokesperson, and hosted the political talk show Li-wun's Strait Talk on TVBS from 2014 to 2015. In October 2025 she was elected KMT chair, becoming the second woman directly elected to lead the party in its history, with the campaign slogan "I am Chinese." After taking office, she became embroiled in controversy over attending a White Terror autumn memorial that honored a Communist spy. On April 10, 2026, she represented the KMT in meeting Xi Jinping in Beijing, becoming the first leader of a major ROC political party to meet with the CCP General Secretary in a decade.
How a Top Student Learned International Politics
Cheng Li-wun was not just a student activist with a single 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 obtained an MSc in international relations from the University of Cambridge, where she was also a doctoral candidate in the field. [^5] These two degrees quietly shaped her entire later career — when she later used terms like "KMT-CCP platform," "peace framework," and "institutional arrangements for war prevention," she was someone who understood what these terms meant in international relations textbooks.
From 1996 to 2000, Cheng served four years as a National Assembly representative for Taipei City under the DPP banner. During the same period, she held positions as deputy director of the DPP's Youth Development Department and deputy convener of the National Assembly caucus. A typical trajectory for the first generation of post-martial-law student activists entering the establishment.
In 2002, the Wu Jui-jen sexual harassment case erupted within the DPP. Dissatisfied with how the party headquarters handled the matter, Cheng had her party rights suspended and subsequently resigned from her DPP positions. [^6] This was the formal moment she left the green camp, but her own later explanation was more blunt: "I discovered that Taiwan independence had long been a joke, a scam." [^7]
In 2005, she accepted Lien Chan's invitation to formally join the KMT. A woman in her thirties, with a law master's degree, Cambridge international relations training, and a history of hunger-striking for Taiwan independence — such a résumé was an exception within the KMT of 2005. That exception was exactly what Lien Chan wanted.
The Warrior, the Controversies, and a TV Show
After joining the KMT, Cheng first served as a spokesperson, then as Executive Yuan spokesperson, and in 2008 entered the Legislative Yuan as an at-large legislator.
Within the party she earned the nickname "the Warrior" — a reference to her sharp rhetoric, her skill on political talk shows, and her willingness to face the camera head-on. During the Ma Ying-jeou era, the pan-blue camp was in a sense being pushed onto the defensive, and Cheng was one of the few who could fight back directly. The Central News Agency described her at the time of her election as chair: "broke through with her warrior image." [^8]
But being a "warrior" came with costs. In 2005, while serving as chair of the KMT's Culture and Communications Committee, she ran a campaign ad naming DPP Taichung mayoral candidate Lin Chia-lung as a "corrupt thug." Lin sued her under the Election and Recall Act. The first-instance court sentenced her to three months' imprisonment and one year of deprivation of civil rights, later reduced to one month's detention with a suspended sentence. [^9] Another controversy involved her violation of KMT regulations on party staff holding outside media positions — she exceeded the four-hour weekly limit as a radio host. Neither controversy was fatal, but together they left a consistent label on her political career: "fights hard, but frequently crosses the line."
From 2014 to 2015, she hosted the TVBS political talk show Li-wun's Strait Talk. [^10] This show cemented her "political commentary style": direct, incisive, cutting to the bone, often cornering opponents with a single sentence. This style was directly connected to her later path to the KMT chairmanship — she did not rise through organizational networks or local factions. She rose through "being able to talk."
On October 18, 2025, the results of the 12th KMT chair election were announced. Cheng won approximately 50% of the vote among four candidates, defeating former Taipei City Mayor Hau Lung-pin and sitting legislator Lo Chih-chiang. She became the second woman directly elected to lead the KMT in party history, after Hung Hsiu-chu. [^11]
The key campaign slogan was just six characters: "I am Chinese."
From "Hunger Strike for Taiwan Independence" to "I Am Chinese"
This is the hardest part of Cheng Li-wun's story to understand.
Her own version goes like this: when she was young, she believed Taiwan independence was a just cause, but after entering the establishment she discovered that the DPP's definition of "Taiwan independence" was fundamentally self-contradictory — on one hand claiming to want independence, on the other never actually pushing for it institutionally. She called this gap "Taiwan independence is a scam," [^12] and even more forcefully, "Taiwan independence fascism." [^13] She maintained that her political stance had not changed; what changed was her judgment about "who was telling the truth."
Her critics' version goes like this: Cheng Li-wun went from an idealistic student activist to someone systematically "remade" by the old-guard KMT apparatus under Lien Chan into a combatant friendly toward Beijing. Every one of her "anti-Taiwan independence" declarations was a step toward the next rung on the ladder. That she was able to sit in the Fujian Hall of the Great Hall of the People in 2026 and talk with Xi Jinping was the final product of this remaking process.
Both versions have evidence, and both have blind spots.
The blind spot in the first version is this: if the judgment that "Taiwan independence is a scam" came from genuine experience, why did this judgment happen to lead directly to "joining the one party that would welcome exactly this judgment"? A purely epistemological shift would not align so perfectly with a career trajectory.
The blind spot in the second version is this: after entering the KMT, Cheng was in fact long considered one of the more radical figures within the blue camp, even seen by old-guard members as "disobedient." Her line was not a copy of the standard KMT line but an independent sub-line. To say "the KMT could have sent any substitute" is inaccurate — she did have her own political judgment.
The truth likely lies somewhere in between: a person with academic training, debating skills, and a desire for influence could not find her place in the green camp within Taiwan's political landscape of the 2000s, so she turned to the blue camp — which happened to need exactly someone who "could speak, had credentials, and had a student activist background" to reshape its image. The two sides found each other. This was not betrayal, nor was it a pure change of conviction — it was a political operative choosing the path most advantageous to herself while also being able to justify it to herself.
But the cost of this choice was: she had to keep moving in Beijing's direction, or the choice would lose its internal logic. From "Taiwan independence is a scam" to "I am Chinese" to "compatriots on both sides of the strait are all Chinese" — she could not stop in the middle.
The White Terror Autumn Memorial and the Photo of Wu Shi
If there is one single event that crystallizes the dynamics described above, it is the November 2025 White Terror Autumn Memorial.
Less than three weeks after Cheng was elected KMT chair, she attended the "1950s White Terror Autumn Memorial and Soul Consolation Ceremony" organized by the Taiwan Region Political Victims Mutual Aid Association. On the list of those being commemorated was a name: Wu Shi. [^14]
Who was Wu Shi? He was the former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Republic of China's Ministry of National Defense, executed at the Machangding execution ground in Taipei in 1950. His crime: Communist spy. He was indeed a high-ranking CCP intelligence agent embedded in Taiwan, codenamed "Secret Envoy No. 1," who provided intelligence to the CCP around the time the ROC government relocated to Taiwan in 1949. History recognizes him as a Communist spy — even the CCP itself later publicly acknowledged him and listed him as a "revolutionary martyr."
The autumn memorial Cheng attended placed Wu Shi on the same commemorative list as other "White Terror victims," and the event also played a Chinese Communist red song, "Song of Rest." The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) issued a statement afterward in unusually strong language: this was "whitewashing a traitor who betrayed his country and sold out his compatriots into a narrative of mutual slaughter and historical tragedy between the KMT and CCP," and "the most serious damage to national dignity." [^15]
Cheng's response had two parts. The first was denial: she said she did not know Wu Shi was on the commemorative list beforehand, and that she attended a "White Terror memorial," not a "memorial for a Communist spy." [^16] The second was an extension: she mentioned that she herself had once hunger-stripped for Huang Hua as a young woman, and believed the tragedies across the strait should be viewed within the same historical narrative — this was the language of "grand historical reconciliation." [^17]
But the second part was precisely the core of the controversy. When a "national security narrative" places a traitorous intelligence agent and ordinary victims of government political persecution within the same commemorative ceremony, history is being rewritten. The narrative shifts from an authoritarian state's repression of its own people to "a civil war tragedy among Chinese people." This rewriting is not a small matter — it slides the position of "ROC victims" from "Taiwanese" to "Chinese."
The core of the MAC's criticism was not "you shouldn't commemorate the White Terror," but rather "you reframed the White Terror from a narrative of local victimhood into a narrative of Chinese civil war." This is a repositioning of identity.
This event and the line "compatriots on both sides of the strait are all Chinese" at the Xi-Cheng meeting five months later — are the same narrative appearing on two different occasions.
April 10, 2026: The End of the Trajectory, or Its Midpoint
On the afternoon of April 10, 2026, Cheng Li-wun walked into the Fujian Hall of the Great Hall of the People and spoke with Xi Jinping for approximately ten minutes. [^18] She raised five proposals