The Straits Forum has convened for eighteen consecutive years. The Democratic Progressive Party has long regarded it with suspicion as an instrument of Beijing's political outreach — but until now, it had never moved to formally investigate an elected local official for participating.
This year it did.
The target was Taitung County Magistrate Rao Ching-ling (饒慶鈴), who never traveled to the mainland. She recorded a video message promoting her county's agricultural products after her application to attend in person was rejected by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC).
The irony is difficult to miss. The official who directed the Ministry of the Interior to investigate Rao was MAC Chairman Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) — one of the few DPP figures who has himself attended the Straits Forum in person.
Whether this reflects Chiu's own eagerness to demonstrate ideological loyalty, or a deliberate signal from President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) to pursue a scorched-earth approach to cross-strait relations, remains unclear.
What is clear is that Lai appears to have set aside his own words from May. In the aftermath of the Trump-Xi summit, he publicly stated that "Taiwan has no independence problem." His senior adviser Chiu Yi-jen (邱義仁) followed by insisting that "resilience does not equal independence."
Yet the MAC and Ministry of Interior's systematic obstruction of cross-strait contact has made it nearly impossible for Lai to shed the "Taiwan independence" label. One has to ask whether that is, in fact, precisely what he intends.
Lai Pays Lip Service to the Tsai Model While Abandoning It in Practice
Cross-strait policy has long been the DPP's most intractable internal contradiction. In the party's early years, breaking down barriers was a point of pride — it helped facilitate veterans' family reunions on the mainland and pushed for lifting cross-strait restrictions under an authoritarian government.
But as the DPP moved closer to the apex of power, pressure from independence-leaning factions intensified. Former President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) dissolved the National Unification Council and its guidelines. The party's internal debate on cross-strait policy was effectively closed before it could begin.
Former President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) held the line by anchoring Taiwan's position in the Republic of China Constitution and the Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area — a special law governing cross-strait affairs that notably contains language referencing the period "before national unification."
Lai has repeatedly pledged to follow the "Tsai Ing-wen model." His conduct in office suggests he either never fully understood what that model entailed, or simply rejects it.
Just before the MAC moved to investigate Rao, the results of a ten-year longitudinal polling study coordinated by National Taiwan University's Center for China Studies were released. The findings deserve serious attention.
Over seventy percent of Taiwan's public — seventy percent being the decade-long average, with this year's figure at sixty percent, a recent low — supports conducting political negotiations with mainland China. The most preferred outcome remains "maintaining the status quo," at roughly forty-five percent.
When asked which political figure they most trusted to conduct those negotiations, former President Tsai ranked first with over twenty-five percent support. Former President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) came second at nine percent. President Lai placed third, at seven percent.
The methodology behind any poll on "political negotiations" invites scrutiny — ordinary respondents may not be parsing the term precisely. But the trend line matters.
Lai's cross-strait trust rating stood at fifteen percent before he took office. Two years in, it has fallen by two percentage points. Given his administration's posture — treating virtually all cross-strait contact as a form of political infiltration — whether that number reads as high or low is almost beside the point.
Under Lai, negotiations are not a policy option. Neither is meaningful dialogue.
Punishing Normal Exchange Will Not Produce Cross-Strait Leverage
As head of state, Lai Ching-te is entitled to his own strategic judgments on Taiwan's security and its relationship with Beijing. But there is an evident contradiction at the heart of his approach.
He extends an olive branch with one hand by invoking "maintaining the status quo" and "cross-strait peace," while using the other to sever the very channels of contact that make any of that credible. And the targets of this crackdown are not Beijing — they are Taiwan's own people: village heads, mainland-born spouses living in Taiwan, and now elected county magistrates.
A recent article in *Foreign Policy* titled "Taiwan Bet Too Big on Washington" argued that the DPP should fundamentally reconsider its reliance on the United States. It went so far as to suggest Lai consider accepting the so-called "1992 Consensus" as a basis for resuming dialogue with Beijing — only then, the piece argued, could Taiwan "determine its own fate under more favorable conditions."
The underlying point is straightforward: Donald Trump is not a reliable ally, and Taiwan risks becoming a bargaining chip in a U.S.-China transaction. If the DPP still genuinely believes that Taiwan's future should be decided by its twenty-three million people, then closing off and criminalizing normal cross-strait exchange is precisely the wrong way to build the negotiating position that principle requires.
The costs of a decade of DPP governance on cross-strait ties are now measurable. Tourist arrivals from the mainland have collapsed. Mainland students studying in Taiwan have dwindled sharply. Cross-strait flights remain far below pre-pandemic levels years after COVID restrictions ended.
Taiwan's international profile has risen — but almost entirely as a symbol of geopolitical risk and semiconductor supply chain anxiety, not as a participant in global governance. The World Health Assembly and the International Civil Aviation Organization, both of which Taiwan attended as an observer during the Ma Ying-jeou administration, have since shut it out entirely. Presidential travel abroad has grown increasingly difficult to arrange.
On this trajectory, Taiwan's international position will only become more constrained.
DPP Officials Traveled to the Mainland for Years. Now the Party Wants to Punish Others for It.
The DPP's posture toward the Straits Forum deserves scrutiny on its own terms. The forum is not a KMT-organized event — which is precisely why DPP-affiliated figures have attended it in the past.
The administration's claim that it is merely applying consistent policy does not hold up. Cross-strait engagement that was entirely legal under previous governments — including previous DPP governments — is now being treated as a potential legal violation, with the threshold for what constitutes a violation set entirely at the MAC's discretion.
That is not policy continuity. It is arbitrary enforcement.
The list of DPP county executives who traveled to the mainland while in office is long: Chen Chu (陳菊), Lai Ching-te himself, Su Chih-fen (蘇治芬), Chen Kuang-fu (陳光復), Su Huan-chih (蘇煥智), Tsao Chi-hung (曹啟鴻), Lin Tsung-hsien (林聰賢), Chen Ming-wen (陳明文), and Chang Hua-kuan (張花冠), among others. All traveled to the mainland as sitting local executives to engage in city-level exchange.
Under the KMT, this was accepted practice. Under the DPP, the same activity — or, in Rao Ching-ling's case, considerably less than the same activity — now triggers a formal investigation.
Rao did not travel to the mainland. She recorded a video message after her application to attend in person was turned down by the MAC. Investigating her for that is not a cross-strait policy. It is a restriction on speech.
The escalation in MAC restrictions follows a clear and deliberate pattern. Last year, central government officials were barred from the Straits Forum, and local officials were "advised" not to attend. This year, participation is banned outright, on the MAC's sole authority.
If the MAC can effectively shut down the Straits Forum with a single directive, what prevents it from doing the same to the Taipei-Shanghai Twin Cities Forum — a channel of city-level dialogue that has been sustained for years?
President Lai should ask himself whether this is truly the direction his party intends to take — particularly heading into local election season, when investigating and penalizing local officials is far more likely to function as a gift to the opposition than as a credible security measure. （Related： Taiwan Rescued Them From Scam Compounds. Some Came Back to Do It Again. ｜ Latest ）
