From Guardian Unlimited: The descendants of Communist party’s former nemesis are making their first ever high-level visit to Beijing. What’s going on, asks Jonathan Watts
Time is not just a great healer, it can play some amusing tricks as well. Or so it would seem after an encouraging new development in relations between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan.
More than 50 years after the Communist party drove Chiang Kai-shek‘s defeated Kuomintang forces across the Strait, it has welcomed back their political representatives not just with open arms, but lavish praise.
Given the timing, the visit to Beijing today of Chiang Pin-kung, the Kuomintang vice-chairman, might have been dismissed as an April fool’s joke. Instead, it was loaded with very real political significance.
