Taiwan Politician Honors Sun Yat-sen in China Visit

ANJING, China, April 27 - The chairman of Taiwan's opposition Nationalist Party, Lien Chan, sought Wednesday to straddle the political gulf between China and Taiwan by paying his respects here at the tomb of a political leader who died 80 years ago.

Mr. Lien is the most senior Taiwanese politician to visit the mainland since the Nationalist Party fled to Taiwan after defeat by Mao's forces 55 years ago, and he pointedly made the first major act of his eight-day visit, which began Tuesday, a pilgrimage to the hillside mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen. Sun was the founder of China's first republic, and Taiwan's Nationalists and China's Communist Party both venerate him as a "father of the nation."

"Mr. Sun Yat-sen is our common national forebear and a revolutionary prophet revered on both sides of the Strait," said Lien, referring to China and Taiwan, in a speech near Sun's mausoleum.

Flanked by zealous Chinese security, television cameras, and thousands of craning onlookers, Mr. Lien, 69, labored up the 392 steps to Sun's granite mausoleum, where he bowed three times before a statue of a seated Sun and laid a wreath.

"This is history happening right now," said Zhao Jiangshan, a graduate student at the Nanjing Postal and Telecommunications University who took time off from class to witness Mr. Lien's visit to the tomb. "It shows there's still hope for peaceful reunification, because both sides still basically share the same values."

But if Mr. Lien's pilgrimage demonstrated the bonds between China and Taiwan's Nationalists - in Chinese, the Kuomintang, or KMT - it also exposed some of the controversies and uncertainties that have bedeviled relations between mainland China and Taiwan. Advocates of Taiwanese independence criticized his visit to the tomb as a betrayal of Taiwan, while in China onlookers also offered varied accounts of the significance of the visit.

Sun Yat-sen was instrumental in establishing the Republic of China, which emerged out of the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911; he founded the Nationalist Party in 1912. After fleeing Nanjing, which was their capital, the Nationalists contended that their new home on Taiwan was the only legitimate continuation of Sun's republic. But China's Communist Party also claimed Sun as an inspirational sympathizer, and his widow was an ardent supporter of Mao.

"The KMT is painting itself as the party that can maintain peace by maintaining historical continuity, but Sun was a very inconsistent figure," said John Fitzgerald, a historian at the Australian National University in Canberra, who has studied Sun Yat-sen's legacy. "His paradox was very much the paradox of contemporary China."

The visit to Sun's tomb signals that the Nationalists are comfortable with their links to the mainland and willing to negotiate, unlike Taiwan's president Chen Shui-bian, who leans toward independence from China, suggested Su Chi, a Nationalist spokesman traveling with Mr. Lien.

"This visit shows the Republic of China is not just a label to be peeled off any time," he said.