KMT steals the show with China visit Asia Times Online
When Taiwan's ruling party and its allies failed to gain a majority of seats in legislative elections in December, it was expected that the same stonewalling of government initiatives by the opposition parties that had dogged Taiwan since the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the presidency in 2000 would continue. Far from delivering more of the same, however, the opposition parties have taken the initiative to such an extent that the government is looking utterly impotent, while Lien Chan, the leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), the largest opposition party, who lost a presidential election to the DPP's Chen Shui-bian by a hair in March last year, is beginning to look as if he never lost the election at all. The current furor surrounds an eight-day trip that Lien is to make to China beginning on Tuesday. The highlight of the visit is a meeting with Chinese Communist Party chief and President Hu Jintao on Friday, after Lien gives a speech to students at Beijing University. The trip raises a number of interesting questions, such as what is Lien going for, what does he hope to achieve, and, of course, how the government feels about being so embarrassingly upstaged?
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