I've been won over by Cheng Li-wun lately.
Cheng Li-wun is the new KMT chair. On October 18, 2025, she won with 50.15% of the vote — only the second woman to chair the KMT, and the first chair to come from a DPP background. After winning, her position was crystal clear: return to the 1992 Consensus, oppose Taiwan independence, push cross-strait exchange through peaceful means.
Last week, April 7 to 12, she led a delegation to the mainland — the first KMT chair-led visit in ten years. The previous one was Eric Chu meeting Xi Jinping in 2015. This time she met Xi at the Great Hall of the People — a high-level reception.
The visit itself was a major event. But what really moved me was what she did after returning to Taiwan.
She Doesn't Do Traditional Press Tours
A typical politician comes back, holds a press conference, chats with state media. She did something different.
She went on livestream. On the night of April 16, she connected with Taiwanese internet personality Chen Zhihan ("Guan Zhang") for over two hours. They covered everything — Xiaomi cars, Taiwan's youth brain drain, mainland smart manufacturing, the gap between the two sides. Direct. No talking points.
Picture this: a politician at the absolute center of cross-strait attention, fresh from being received by the highest leader on the other side, comes home and instead of going to mainstream media, sits down with a streamer and just talks for hours on camera.
Counterintuitive. But also natural.
I watched a stretch of it. What she said had real impact. She wasn't reading prepared lines — she was actually thinking through it, actually saying things she believed. People like that are rare in politics.
She and Guan Zhang weren't a one-off pairing either. Back in June 2025, they had already started something called the "Non-Party Opposition Alliance," pulling people from across the political spectrum into dialogue. The livestream was a natural extension.
The Risk She's Carrying
The other thing I respect is the risk.
Pushing cross-strait peace right now is dangerous, period. The American side has been running operations for years — espionage, infiltration, assassinations — and it has never stopped. None of it acknowledged in public, but always running. As the most visible person pushing on this issue, she's a target by definition.
Her willingness to step forward, push this visit through, come back and keep extending the work — that's not nothing. The risk to her physical safety is real, not rhetorical.
The Lei Jun Segment Says Something Specific
The part of the livestream where she talked about meeting Lei Jun stuck with me.
She said the last day of the trip was a visit to the Beijing Xiaomi car super-factory. Lei Jun received her personally, she test-drove the YU7, and she even got a Xiaomi phone. She said she's a Lei Jun fan, and her husband is even more so. Their household runs on Xiaomi — cups, phones, wristbands, backpacks, tablets, all of it. When Lei Jun was explaining a Xiaomi cup set at 29.9 yuan, she laughed and said "everything in our home is Xiaomi."
This segment says one specific thing.
A politician just received by the highest leader on the other side comes home and openly says she was thrilled to meet Lei Jun, because she's a fan. Who is Lei Jun? An entrepreneur. Someone expressing himself daily on Douyin and Weibo. Someone continuously extending his identity through products and content.
The identity he has built in the digital world has this much energy: it can make one of the most politically influential people in the region voluntarily declare herself a fan.
The reverse is true too. Why has Cheng Li-wun been able to generate so much discussion so fast? Not through official statements. Through livestreams, dialogues with internet personalities — pushing her thinking directly to people, her own way.
This reinforced a take I've held: digital identity is the biggest individual leverage we have right now. Cuts across industry, cuts across direction. Politicians, entrepreneurs, creators, researchers — whoever does it earliest comes out ahead.
This Era Especially Needs Political Thinkers
Bigger point.
Everyone talks about AI like the technology by itself solves everything. I'm increasingly convinced it doesn't.
This wave of AI is changing economics — the underlying logic and the production formula are shifting hard. Every historical shift of this magnitude has triggered a reshuffling of society. Power gets redistributed, wealth gets redistributed, sometimes nations even go to war.
The thing is, the technology itself is neutral. People all over the world are using more or less the same AI; the threshold isn't that high. But look around: Silicon Valley engineers in stable environments working out how to use Claude to boost research efficiency; parts of Africa where people don't have drinking water; Ukraine living daily with the threat of incoming missiles.
Why?
Not because they can't get the technology. Because the modes of organization, the modes of distribution, the political structures are completely different.
So what really shapes a society or a world has never been only the scientists. Scientists matter, but they're not the only narrative. King's "I have a dream" pushed racial equality. Gandhi did nonviolent resistance. Deng took China from absolute poverty to a different state. What all of these people did was change how humans organize, distribute, and relate to each other.
That kind of work matters more than ever right now.
An Era When the Rites Have Broken Down
Bluntly: the world is entering a new phase.
I've told friends this — the configuration looks very much like the transition from late Spring and Autumn into the Warring States. The rites have broken down.
The old world order was held by the US: IMF, UN, World Bank, cultural exports, the whole package. Not necessarily fair, but at least everyone was paying surface lip service to the rules. A bit like the Spring and Autumn period: feudal lords going to war still needed a pretext, still had to invoke the Zhou king for legitimacy, still had to dress their actions in the language of rites and morality.
What Trump is doing now is no longer that.
Venezuela is one example. On January 3, 2026, US forces struck inside Venezuela and arrested President Maduro, who is now held in the US to face drug-trafficking charges. Trump immediately announced a "historic energy agreement" with Venezuela — his exact words were that the US would now "run Venezuela," and that Venezuelan oil interests would belong to the US. Venezuela's proven oil reserves are about 303 billion barrels, the largest in the world.
Iran was even harsher. On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel jointly killed Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei. There was no formal declaration of war, no congressional authorization. Picture this: two countries already tense but not in a state of declared hostility, and one suddenly kills the other's top leader, then announces it as a successful military operation. Any head of state watching that gets cold chills.
Greenland is another thread. He has openly said he won't rule out using military force to take Greenland from Denmark, and threatened a 25% tariff to push Denmark to hand it over. He temporarily walked it back after Davos in January 2026, but the posture is already on the table: I want it, you'd better hand it over.
Put these three together and the signal is clear: between major powers, the pretense is gone. Whoever has the bigger fist makes the rules. Morality, rules, procedure — all of it can be thrown out.
This is what late Spring and Autumn felt like.
A Hundred Schools Contending
But late Spring and Autumn had another side: the contention of a hundred schools.
When everyone is stable and settled, ideas and new theories of governance don't have a market — nobody needs them. But when the existing modes of organization start collapsing, while a new economic foundation is being born at extreme speed, that is exactly when ideas have to appear.
That's right now.
One side: the old order is breaking down. The other: a new economic foundation from AI. Both sides are moving.
What this era needs, in my view, is not just scientists. We need more thinkers, more political practitioners, more people experimenting with modes of organization — people exploring what kinds of social arrangements fit this technology, this configuration, this reality.
That's the biggest thing Cheng Li-wun has stirred in me. Her approach is exactly what this era calls for: direct dialogue, livestreaming with internet personalities, thinking out loud on camera. Carrying personal risk to push something forward — that, too, is the posture this era needs.
The Form Doesn't Have to Be Fancy
When it comes to transmitting ideas, there's an easy wrong turn now: trying to make the form fancy, very produced, full of innovation cues. A short video, an animation, an interactive installation. All impressive — but not the only path.
Words and writing themselves carry enormous power. No matter how saturated short video gets, that doesn't go away.
What Cheng Li-wun did was: sit down, turn on the livestream, talk about what she's seeing, what she's thinking, how she feels. No editing, no filters, no script. But in those few hours of conversation, the volume of information and the resonance she transmitted exceeded a hundred carefully produced PR videos.
China Is in a Window Right Now
Back to ourselves.
Against the backdrop of a violently shaking world, China right now is a relatively stable patch. Outside is fighting hard, inside is relatively calm. Tense outside, loose inside. That itself is a remarkable achievement — and a precious window.
In this window, there is already a wave of very young people doing real political work on the front lines. At the county level, the village level, the district level — young leaders running real experiments and finding new ways to express themselves.
But that's still far from enough.
The hundred-schools moment in Spring and Autumn wasn't everyone going their own way and talking past each other. It was dozens of small states and hundreds of thinkers, each running experiments in their own corner, then converging — debating, exchanging, comparing results. Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, Mohism — they all grew in that environment. If today we only have scattered practice with no exchange or collision, the hundred schools can't take off.
So I hope more people — researchers, founders, political workers, local officials, content creators — bring out their own thinking, run experiments, use digital identity to put it out there, find both resonance and disagreement.
What one person can change is amplified now. It's not that nothing can be done — it's that there's an extraordinary amount you can try.
What Cheng Li-wun did is not a grand-power strategy. It's one visit, a few livestreams, a few conversations. But it really did change how a lot of people felt and thought.
We can do the same.
References
- Cheng Li-wun elected KMT chair — October 18, 2025, won with 50.15% (65,122 votes). Second woman to chair the KMT, first chair from a DPP background.
- Cheng Li-wun's delegation arrives on the mainland — April 7–12, 2026 "Journey of Peace 2026," visiting Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Beijing.
- Xi Jinping meets Cheng Li-wun — April 10, 2026 at the Great Hall of the People, the first meeting between KMT and CCP leaders in nearly a decade (the previous one was Eric Chu and Xi in 2015).
- Taiwan's opposition leader arrives in China for a 'Journey of Peace' — NPR coverage of the trip.
- The Domestic Politics of Cheng Li-wun's China Trip — The Diplomat's analysis of the trip's political significance.
- Cheng Li-wun visits Xiaomi factory; Lei Jun receives her personally — April 12, 2026 visit to the Beijing Xiaomi auto super-factory; test drive of the YU7.
- Cheng Li-wun openly a Lei Jun fan — Publicly stated she and her husband are Lei Jun fans; their household is full of Xiaomi products.
- Cheng Li-wun's livestream with Chen Zhihan — April 16, 2026 evening; over two hours of livestreamed conversation covering Xiaomi cars, Taiwan's youth brain drain, the cross-strait gap.
- Founding of the Non-Party Opposition Alliance — June 2025; co-founded by Cheng Li-wun and Chen Zhihan, gathering different parts of the political spectrum into dialogue.
- US strike on Venezuela and arrest of Maduro — January 3, 2026 US military strike inside Venezuela; arrest of President Maduro.
- Trump Claims 'Historic' Venezuela Oil Deal After Maduro Arrest — Military.com; Trump announces taking over Venezuelan oil.
- Assassination of Ali Khamenei — Wikipedia — February 28, 2026 joint US-Israel operation kills Iran's Supreme Leader.
- U.S. and Israel launch a major attack on Iran — PBS coverage of the operation.
- Greenland crisis — Wikipedia — Trump threatens 25% tariff on Denmark and won't rule out military means to take Greenland.
- Proposed United States acquisition of Greenland — Background on US sovereignty intentions toward Greenland.
原文链接：https://guanjiawei.ai/en/blog/zheng-liwen-hundred-schools
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