Taiwan’s Opposition Leader Says Talking to China Is the Island’s Best Defense

“This is a really important time for Taiwan,” she says. “Are we going to go toward war or toward peace across the Strait? This is really why I decided to take the party chair.”

Standing 5 ft. 10 in., Cheng is an arresting presence with a reputation for chest-thumping speeches. Sure enough, during our interview, her answers betray a bombastic staccato honed on the stump. Behind the scenes, however, she is amiable and slightly introverted.

“I actually am a very, very quiet person,” she says. “I don’t like to see people, and I don’t like to talk to people. I like to keep to myself.”

It’s a surprising revelation given Cheng’s political journey under the spotlight, which in many ways reflects the complicated social dynamics of Taiwan, where political fault lines have historically been drawn between native islanders and mainland arrivals following the Civil War.

Cheng grew up in the southern city of Tainan, the daughter of a Taiwanese mother and a KMT soldier father from China’s southwestern Yunnan province, who fled to Taiwan in 1953 via Southeast Asia’s arcane Golden Triangle. “My father really hated politics, hated war, and hated the army,” Cheng says. “He hated the KMT. My father thought all politicians are assholes!”