'EXTERNAL INTERFERENCE' CANNOT STOP CHINA, TAIWAN UNIFICATION: XI JINPING

Taiwan’s former president Ma Ying-jeou is in China as part of a ‘journey of peace’ to calm tensions with Beijing, which claims the island as its own territory

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Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday that “external interference” would not stop Beijing from unifying with Taiwan, as he met the self-ruled island’s former leader in a rare display of cross-strait dialogue.

Taiwan’s former president Ma Ying-jeou is in China as part of what he has called a “journey of peace” to calm tensions with Beijing, which claims the island as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring it under its control.

Xi welcomed a delegation headed by Ma to Beijing on Wednesday afternoon, Chinese and Taiwanese media reported, in a rare meeting between current or former leaders in Beijing and Taipei, and the first since a landmark summit between the two men in 2015 when Ma was still in office.

“The Chinese nation has written the indivisible history of both sides of the Taiwan Strait and engraved the fact that our compatriots... are connected by blood,” Xi said in footage of the meeting broadcast by Taiwan’s TVBS News.