The
2005 Pan-Blue visits to mainland China were a series of groundbreaking visits by delegations of the
Kuomintang (KMT) to
mainland China. They were hailed as the highest level of exchange between the
Communist Party of China and the
Kuomintang since
Chiang Kai-shek and
Mao Zedong met in
Chongqing,
China on August 28, 1945.
On March 28, 2005, the Kuomintang's vice chairman
Chiang Pin-kung led a delegation in the first official visit to mainland China by a senior leader of the Kuomintang in 60 years. Later, on April 26, 2005, a 70-member delegation led by the Kuomintang's chairman
Lien Chan left
Taipei for
Nanjing via
Hong Kong, launching
Lien Chan's 8-day
Taiwan Strait peace tour, also the first such visit to mainland China in 60 years.
While in mainland China, Lien met with General Secretary
Hu Jintao and expressed interest in improving
cross-strait dialogues. Both also re-affirmed a belief in the "
One China principle", which was not acknowledged by Taiwan's then-ruling party, the
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Lien's itinerary also included visits to
Xi'an, where he had lived as a child during the
Second Sino-Japanese War and
World War II;
Nanjing, the former
capital of the
Republic of China and the site of the
Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum; and
Shanghai, China's largest city and site of extensive Taiwanese financial and economic investment in recent years.
Background
In 2004, the KMT first proposed that the former president candidate Lien Chan would visit mainland...
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