2005 Pan–Blue visits to mainland China
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The 2005 Pan–Blue visits to mainland China were a series of groundbreaking visits by delegations of the Kuomintang[note 1] (KMT) and their allied Pan-Blue Coalition to mainland China. They were hailed as the highest level of exchange between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang since Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong met in Chongqing, China on August 28, 1945.
On March 28, 2005, the Kuomintang's vice chairman Chiang Pin-kung led a delegation in the first official visit to mainland China by a senior leader of the Kuomintang in 60 years. Later, on April 26, 2005, a 70-member delegation led by the Kuomintang's chairman Lien Chan left Taipei for the ROC's de jure capital of Nanjing via Hong Kong, launching Lien's 8-day Taiwan Strait peace tour; also the first such visit to mainland China in 60 years.
While in mainland China, Lien met with General Secretary Hu Jintao and expressed interest in improving cross-strait dialogues. Both also re-affirmed a belief in the "One China principle", which was not acknowledged by Taiwan's then-ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP); a part of Taiwan's Pan-Green Coalition.
Lien's itinerary also included visits to Xi'an, where he had lived as a child during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II; Nanjing, the official capital of the Republic of China and the site of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum; and Shanghai, China's largest city and site of extensive Taiwanese financial and economic investment in recent years.