Taiwan’s labor minister left for China on Sunday to attend an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation labor meeting in Nanjing, the first ministerial-level visit across the strait under President Lai Ching-te. The trip tests how far Taipei can keep a functional APEC channel open while Beijing rejects Lai’s offers of talks and sends warships and aircraft around the island on a near-daily basis.
Schedule and stakes
Hung Sun-han boarded an evening flight to Nanjing and is scheduled to join sessions on Monday before returning to Taiwan, the Ministry of Labor said. APEC is one of the few multilateral bodies in which Taiwan participates under its economy’s name, and China is host nation this year ahead of a leaders summit planned for November in Shenzhen. World leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected at that summit, making every pre-meeting ministerial stop a signal of who gets a seat at the table.
Hung told reporters this week that he would attend on the principle of parity and dignity — language Taipei uses whenever Beijing tries to frame Taiwan’s participation as a domestic affair. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Chen Binhua said earlier this month that Taiwan’s APEC activities would be handled under the one-China principle, a formula Taipei’s Mainland Affairs Council has rejected as political packaging rather than a working rule for technocratic meetings.
What changed since Lai took office
Formal cross-strait communication has been frozen for a decade, and Beijing has labeled Lai a separatist since his inauguration in 2024. Yet Taiwan officials have still joined APEC working sessions in Chinese cities this year, including a May trip to Suzhou by then-top trade negotiator Yang Jen-ni. Hung’s ministerial rank raises the profile of those contacts because labor policy touches migration, occupational safety, and gig-economy rules that both sides regulate at home even when they disagree on sovereignty.
Reuters reported the departure from Taipei on Sunday morning, noting that the visit comes as China has increased military drills around Taiwan. The Ministry of National Defense said that between Saturday and Sunday it tracked five People’s Liberation Army aircraft crossing the median line and more than a dozen naval and official vessels operating around the island — a routine gray-zone pattern that Hung’s flight does not pause.
What Taipei is not doing
The labor ministry emphasized that Hung is traveling for a specific APEC agenda, not for bilateral political talks. There is no announced meeting with senior Chinese Communist Party officials on the public schedule, and the Mainland Affairs Council has not framed the trip as a breakthrough in the way earlier Kuomintang-led governments sometimes described cross-strait economic forums.
That caution matters for domestic politics. Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party base is wary of any visit that could be spun in Beijing as acceptance of its sovereignty claims, while business groups want stable channels for labor mobility and technical cooperation. Hung’s narrow mandate — labor standards within APEC — gives both sides a face-saving container.
What to watch in Nanjing
Monday’s sessions will show whether Chinese hosts allow Taiwanese officials to speak under their economy’s name and whether any side statements leak beyond the labor portfolio. For Taiwan’s security planners, the trip runs parallel to continued PLA activity; for labor unions, it is a chance to compare notes on occupational heat rules and platform-worker protections before Taipei’s humid autumn construction season peaks.
Until Hung lands back in Taiwan, the documented facts are the flight, the APEC host calendar, and Beijing’s one-China rhetoric sitting alongside another gray-zone military tally — diplomacy in one venue and pressure in another, on the same Sunday.
