James Soong, chairman of the People First party, yesterday became the latest Taiwanese opposition politician to make a pilgrimage to mainland China. He follows Lien Chan, leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), who was greeted as a hero and met Hu Jintao, president of China, in Beijing last week.

For Chinese Communists, and for Taiwanese people such as Mr Lien, who was born in China, these trips are of historic significance. The nationalists of the KMT were the Communists' foes in the Chinese civil war, but they always saw themselves as Chinese and ended up on the island of Taiwan in 1949 only because they had been defeated on the mainland.