BEIJING, March 28: China on Monday welcomed the first-ever delegation from Taiwan’s largest opposition party. Thirty members of the Kuomintang (KMT) arrived in the south Chinese city of Guangzhou, a stronghold during the party’s revolutionary heyday in the early 20th century. “We hope to help ease cross-strait tensions to ensure people’s well-being,” said KMT vice chairman P. K. Chiang, who headed the delegation. “(We hope) to do what the government does not do and cannot do.”

Topics likely to be discussed included the opening of direct transport links and better protection of Taiwanese businessmen in China, he said. The China Times, a Taiwan newspaper, said the group was to meet Jia Qinglin, nominally China’s fourth-most powerful politician, on Thursday.

Observers said the trip, the first official visit by the KMT to the mainland since it was defeated by communist forces in 1949, was a prelude to a mainland visit by its leader Lien Chan.

The KMT has called for friendly ties with Beijing while Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) favours declaring the island independent. “The trip marks the beginning of renewed collaboration between the KMT and the Communist Party,” DPP lawmaker Lai Ching-teh told reporters, referring to previous cooperation between the two parties in the 1920s and 1930s.

“Their strategy is joining forces to put pressure on Taiwan, to force the island into a dead end,” he said. In Guangzhou, the delegates will pay homage to 72 KMT martyrs who died overthrowing the Qing dynasty and founding the Republic of China in 1912.

They will subsequently fly to the eastern city of Nanjing to commemorate Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the republic that emerged after the collapse of the Chinese empire.

A likely top agenda item for Mr Chiang is the anti-secession law, passed by China’s parliament earlier this month and authorizing the use of force against Taiwan if it moves towards formal independence.

Taiwan authorities have criticized it as tantamount to giving the Chinese military a blank check to invade the island, leaving people in constant fear.

Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian and hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese took to the streets on Saturday, waving banners and shouting slogans for peace and democracy to protest the law.

“As for Chen, his participation in the protest added to his record as a man of bad faith,” Beijing’s English-language China Daily said in an editorial on Monday.

While slamming Mr Chen, the paper gave the KMT and other Taiwan-based opposition parties a pat on the back for having stayed away from the demonstration.

“The opposition parties refused to participate in the demonstration because they see no need to take any irrational moves relating to the anti-secession bill,” the editorial said.

—Reuters