(ANSA) - BEIJING, MARCH 27 - Taiwan's former president MaYing-jeou, who left for China today almost coinciding with incumbent president Tsai Ing-wen's trip to the US and Central America, arrived in Shanghai in the afternoon, welcomed at the airport by officials from the Taiwan Labor Office, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the CPC.
Ma, president from 2008 to 2016 and a leading figure of the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalists, left immediately afterwards for Nanjing: he will remain in China until April 7 at the head of a student delegation and will pay homage to his ancestors in Hunan.
Tsai, on the other hand, should leave on Wednesday and have a double stopover in the US (New York and Los Angeles) in view of the official visits to his diplomatic allies Belize and Guatemala.
He will then speak in New York and receive an award from the Hudson Institute, a think tank, while his office has not commented on rumors of a meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California.
Ma's trip is seen as an attempt to rewrite his political legacy: the stay is ostensibly private in nature: his office has said he will not travel to Beijing or see Chinese President Xi Jinping, already seen briefly at the historic meeting in Singapore in September 2015. But the mission is significant in several respects: Ma is the first former Taiwanese leader to visit China since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
With less than 10 months to go before Taiwan's presidential election, Beijing is mounting pressure on Taipei.
The KMT, traditionally characterized by more conciliatory approaches to Beijing, has lost its last two presidential races, but won a landslide victory in last year's local elections.
But finally, according to media leaks, he could meet Wang Huning, the No. 4 of the CCP and the ideologue of President Xi, who has been entrusted with the task of drawing up a new political proposal for reunification after the 'one country, two systems' model become indigestible on the island due to the authoritarian drift registered in Hong Kong.
(HANDLE).