In 1923, revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen and Soviet representative Joffe issued a joint declaration; the following year, the Chinese Kuomintang was reorganized and Communist Party members joined the Kuomintang as individuals. For the revolutionary camp that had suffered repeated setbacks, Soviet assistance and cooperation with the Kuomintang and the Communist Party were a realistic choice to reorganize the organization, build military strength, and confront the warlords. This cooperation also profoundly changed the two parties, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, and finally broke down in 1927, leading to a long-term conflict between the two parties.
Attributing all the Chinese Communist Party's seizure of power in 1949 to Sun Yat-sen is untenable based on historical facts. The CCP’s subsequent victory also involved multiple factors such as the Anti-Japanese War, the Civil War, the governance of the National Government, and the international situation. However, the first cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party did give the originally small CCP the opportunity to enter a larger political organization and participate in mass mobilization; both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party also expanded their own strength during the cooperation. This experience shows that political cooperation is never about unilaterally using others.
More than a hundred years later, the scene is completely different, but there is something familiar about the temptation of power. This year, Chairman Cheng Lai-wen of the Chinese Kuomintang publicly linked Blue and White cooperation to the 2028 political party rotation. The National Congress in July even announced full policy and electoral cooperation with the Taiwan People's Party. On the other hand, the Kuomintang resumed high-level exchanges between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party that had been suspended for ten years in April, and Zheng Liwen went to China to meet with Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.
Blue-White cooperation is competition and cooperation between political parties within a democratic system, while exchanges between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party involve another level. Beijing has publicly declared its pursuit of reunification and has not promised to renounce the use of force. When the Kuomintang strives to return to central power through blue-and-white cooperation and regards the resumption of exchanges between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party as a cross-strait peace plan, it must answer: When Beijing's unification goal has not changed, how can the exchanges between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party prevent Taiwan's internal party competition from being transformed into its own political interests by Beijing?
History will not be copied exactly as it is. Today's Taiwan has democratic elections and political party rotation, which is incomparable to the era of warlord separatism. However, when political parties are looking for allies in a difficult situation, it is easy to overestimate their ability to control cooperation and underestimate that the partners they cooperate with have their own purposes.
A hundred years ago, the Kuomintang chose to unite with Russia and accommodate the Communist Party in a revolutionary dilemma; a hundred years later, the Kuomintang listed the 2028 party rotation as a blue-white cooperation goal and reopened high-level exchanges between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. The warning left by history is simple: if you only calculate who can help you win in front of you, you will often forget who changed whom after cooperation.
