"A Taipei representative in Hong Kong was barred from meeting Lien Chan, chairman of the Kuomintang, at the former British crown colony yesterday, a Mainland Affairs Council spokesman said.
Yu Ying-lung told the press the MAC regretted that Pao Cheng-kang, manager of the China Travel Agency in Hong Kong, was prevented from meeting Lien during a brief stopover on his way to Nanjing. Chinese officials, including the head of the Taiwan office in Hong Kong, were on hand to welcome Lien at the airport when he arrived from Taipei at 1200 p.m.
'We regret that Pao has been barred and cannot understand why,' Yu said."
This brief article in The China Post (I didn't see it in the other two papers, although it seems pretty important) sums up everything that is wrong with Lien Chan's trip. The Taiwan representative in Hong Kong is not permitted to meet Lien at the airport because China does not recognize or validate the democratic process that he has participated in. This dovetails with Lien's own denial of the validity of the same democratic election and the subsequent judicial confirmation of the validity of the election. Denying his own government is a condition of this trip, which is why it should never have happened.
VP Lu Xiu Lian made essentially the same point the other day: "I saw an extremely suspect phenomenon (at the airport). The pan-Green (pro-independence) camp, who do not like waving the national flag are waving it and the KMT chairman and vice chairman say they are not allowed to bring their own flag back to their home towns." The flag, of course, is suspect in the eyes of Greens because it symbolizes the fusion of party and state in the martial law era. The flag is an anachronism in the multi-state democracy Taiwan has become, but the issue is too loaded to take on the project of changing it. The KMT, which has made a cult of the flag, Sun Yat-Sen and the similarly outdated constitution, now acquiesces in being told that they can't carry the flag? It calls into question if there's anything left that the KMT believes in at all.
