By Ben Blanchard and J.R. Wu
BEIJING/KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan (Reuters) - When China's man in charge of ties with Taiwan visited the island's pro-independence heartland last year, protesters threw paint and waved placards deriding him as a "communist bandit", a reminder to autocratic China of Taiwan's democratic stripes.
The reason Zhang Zhijun was in Kaohsiung was highly unusual - to meet a senior figure from Taiwan's main opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), a fiery politician unafraid to upset Beijing with her support for causes China hates, like human rights in the troubled far-western Chinese region of Xinjiang.
Once unthinkable, public interaction between senior Communist Party and DPP officials has slowly been growing, as both seek an informal way to talk in the likely event the DPP takes power again next month.
Nationalist (KMT) forces retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the Chinese civil war to the Communists, but economic ties between the two sides have grown since President Ma Ying-jeou, of the KMT, came to power in 2008.
Taiwan votes in a new president and parliament in January when the KMT is expected to be soundly beaten by the DPP, supported by voters angered by a perceived economic dependence on the mainland.
The links between Beijing and the DPP will be crucial to managing one of the world's most potentially dangerous relationships, with Taiwan facing a China that aims hundreds of missiles at the island and has never renounced the use of force to bring it under Beijing's control.
"It's risk management for both, a pragmatic arrangement to keep lines of communication open," said a senior Western diplomat who has regular contacts with officials on both sides of the dispute, speaking on condition of anonymity.
One of the main politicians leading the charge for the DPP has been Kaohsiung mayor Chen Chu, the one who hosted Zhang last year and who has visited China twice to promote international events her city was hosting.
Chen, a former political prisoner at the forefront of Taiwan's struggle for democracy, told Reuters this month she hoped to slowly build trust between the DPP and Beijing, but did not see herself as a conduit for DPP presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen. Chen is Tsai's campaign chief.
China, she said, needed to listen to more than just one side in Taiwan.
"I think the cross-strait relationship is not for a single party to monopolise," Chen added, referring to the strip of water between the two sides. By "a single party", she meant the KMT. "It cannot represent the voice of all of the people of Taiwan. I believe exchanges are important and mutual goodwill is also very important."
STEP TOO FAR
Chen has not shied away from irritating Beijing. In 2009, just after she first went to China, she refused to pull from the city's film festival a documentary about an exiled Xinjiang leader China detests.
She was back in China in 2013.
To be sure, China does not refer to get-togethers with DPP officials as party-to-party exchanges - that is still a step too far for a country that seethes at the suggestion Taiwan is not an inalienable part of China.
China's Taiwan Affairs Office, asked about contacts with the DPP, said in a statement sent to Reuters that unless the DPP abandoned its support for Taiwan independence, there could never be party-to-party contacts.
"We welcome DPP personages to visit the mainland using an appropriate identity and name, to get an on-ground understanding of the mainland's development and further understand its policy towards Taiwan. But this is not a party-to-party exchange."
In the past few months, China has made little secret of its deep suspicion of the DPP, and for Tsai, the presidential frontrunner, firing off invective after invective.
But China has set aside its distaste for the DPP before, at least behind closed doors.
When the DPP's Chen Shui-bian was president of Taiwan from 2000 to 2008, China stonewalled him, accusing him of pushing for the island's formal independence.
Yet at least one senior DPP member and Chen's businessmen friends frequented China privately, a Chinese source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
"They came and met personal friends at high levels of the (Communist) Party and the government," the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Chen Shui-bian was (pro) Taiwan independence but we had to face reality and resolve issues."
Former DPP presidential candidate Frank Hsieh and Tainan city mayor and ranking DPP member William Lai have also openly visited China.
Such visits were about communication and exchanges and the DPP saw them in a positive light, the party said in a statement.
For Kaohsiung mayor Chen, who is not related to the former Taiwan president, she hopes China can have a better understanding of Taiwan's democracy through their engagements with her and her city, one of the world's busiest ports.
"I think at least I've lived through Taiwan from its most basic level ? from the (democracy) movements during the dictatorship of the Nationalists," she said.
"So I feel I at least represent a different kind of voice."
(Additional reporting by Benjamin Kang Lim in BEIJING; Editing by Nick Macfie)
