Xi Offers Warm Words with Veiled Threats in Meeting With Taiwan Opposition Chief

China’s President Xi Jinping met the leader of Taiwan’s biggest opposition party in Beijing on Friday and they sounded like long lost friends.

Xi called for cooperation and peace. Cheng, the first head of Taiwan’s Beijing-friendly Kuomintang to visit China in a decade, echoed the message, saying both sides should seek to prevent war and expressed hope that the Taiwan Strait separating the two governments won’t become a “chessboard for external interference.”

Cheng, whose party has lost three successive presidential elections in Taiwan, argues that the KMT can safeguard the island’s future by maintaining deterrence while engaging in dialogue with Beijing.

The 56-year-old former talk show host is an outsider who has little support among senior leadership within her own party or the Taiwanese public in general, who largely distrust Beijing’s intentions. A long-running poll from the Election Study Center at Taipei’s National Chengchi University shows there is little support for unification with China.

Cheng is getting the rock star treatment in China. Like so many political machinations around the world right now, it partly traces back to Donald Trump, who’s set to visit Beijing for a summit with Xi in mid-May.

During the sitdown with Cheng, Xi reaffirmed Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over the self-governing democracy and gave a thinly veiled warning against interference from the US.

By engaging with Cheng, who has publicly stated her support for the 1992 consensus framework that recognizes both sides of the Taiwan Strait falls under “one China,” Beijing is reminding the US president that it can manage its relationship with Taipei peacefully — but on Xi’s terms. It’s a non-too-subtle warning to the US to stay out of one of the world’s key geopolitical flashpoints.

Keep track of the twists and turns — and the global fallout — of the war with Iran here.

The fragile Iran ceasefire remains fragile ahead of key talks this weekend. Trump said he was “optimistic” about a deal with Iran at the same time he threatened the country over charging fees in the Strait of Hormuz, which remains effectively shut. Read an explainer why the ceasefire hasn’t led to Hormuz reopening.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to hold talks with Lebanon even as he vowed to keep fighting Iran-backed Hezbollah in the country, which suffered the deadliest single-day attacks since the war erupted over a month ago. Vice President JD Vance is expected to lead the American delegation in discussions scheduled for Islamabad on Saturday. Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father was killed in the early days of the war, repeated demands for war reparations — a likely nonstarter for US negotiators. Israel’s ongoing campaign against Hezbollah also risks undermining the talks.