Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou's office yesterday to protest against his meeting in Singapore with President Xi Jinping , fearing the island may surrender its self-governance to the mainland.
Protesters started storming the heavily guarded parliament building in Taipei overnight. At Songshan airport in the city, police arrested 27 people who tried to push their way through a side gate as Ma left for the meeting.
Three protesters from anti-Beijing NGO Democracy Tautin were denied entry to Singapore by custom officials, who told them that one day was simply too short for travel and took them to a small room for questioning and fingerprinting, the group posted it on its Facebook page.
Later, after the meeting had begun, around 500 protesters in Taipei including rights activists and environmentalists spilled their anger over what they perceived as Ma's warm response to Xi's comment in his opening remarks that "We are brothers".
"How can he... without any negotiation go to meet with the leader of our enemy? I believe this is getting to the level of treason," said Lin Hsiu-hsin, vice-chairman of the Taiwan Association of University Professors.
The Xi-Ma summit was lauded as a milestone of the cross-strait relationship by pro-Kuomintang officials in Taiwan.
"I believe the system of scheduling meetings between mainland Chinese and Taiwanese leaders has been established," Wang Jin-pyng, president of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, told Central News Agency. "It benefits both sides across the strait, Asia and the whole world."
But for the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party - the biggest rival of Ma Ying-jeou's ruling Kuomintang - the meeting was less historic than "a time of news," said its chairman Tsai Ing-wen. Tsai is the frontrunner candidate for the island's presidential election in January.
"President Ma departed with people's doubts of under-table operation, and he is going to bring back bigger controversy with him," Tsai said after the Xi-Ma meeting.
"We are very disappointed that the only achievement from this meeting is supporting Ma's attempt to use political frameworks to limit people's future choices on the cross-straits issue."