By Shannon Tiezzi
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council Minister Wang Yu-chi will travel to China to meet with his counterpart, Zhang Zhijun.
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Minister Wang Yu-chi announced that he will meet with China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Director Zhang Zhijun in the mainland Chinese city of Nanjing on February 11. While in Nanjing, Wang will also visit the tomb of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the KMT or Nationalist Party and a celebrated figure in both China and Taiwan. Wang will travel to Shanghai for meetings on February 13 before returning to Taiwan on February 14.
The meeting will be the highest-level dialogue between officials from China and Taiwan since 1949. However, Wang and Zhang have met before — they both sat in on a meeting between Taiwan’s former Vice President Vincent Siew and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Bali. This format was far more typical for China-Taiwan meetings: a current government official from one side, and a retired, unofficial representative from the other. During that meeting, Xi Jinping expressed his intention to “push forward the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations.”
The APEC meeting was also the occasion of Xi’s much-quoted statement that cross-strait political issues “must reach a final resolution … these issues cannot be passed on from generation to generation.” The quote sparked a flurry of speculation that Xi was angling to solve the Taiwan issue once and for all.
Read the full story at The Diplomat