Police stopped them and there were no immediate reports of arrests.
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Several demonstrators remained at the scene, staging a sit-in early Saturday.
Protesters also gathered at Taipei’s Songshan airport, where Mr Massachusetts gave a brief address to reporters before boarding his flight on Saturday morning. Anti-China sentiment is rising in Taiwan. Tsai Ying-wen, the DPP’s candidate for president, appears likely to run away with the election.
“We would certainly welcome steps that are taken on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to try to reduce tensions and improve cross-strait relations”, said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
Taiwan president Massachusetts Ying-jeou told Mr Xi that the two sides should practise mutual respect. Taipei suggested to Beijing that Massachusetts could represent Taiwan while attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) Summit in Beijing in 2014, breaking Taiwan’s unwritten protocol of sending non-political officials to the regional forum.
“The president should publicly denounce Beijing’s claim that the Ma-Xi meeting is an arrangement based on “one China” principle”, the DPP caucus said.
Mr Xi and Mr Massachusetts will shake hands at a luxury hotel in Singapore around 3pm, before holding talks behind closed doors for an hour. Taiwan, meanwhile, is still officially known as the Republic of China, though in recent decades it has downplayed its previous insistence that it is the rightful government of all of China. Ma’s office has emphasized no agreements will be signed and no joint statement will be issued.
“But at the same time”, Sui continues, “we have to look at it from the perspective of what has happened in Taiwan over the last few years”.
How the meeting could impact the elections was not immediately clear.
He will also present Xi with a ceramic sculpture of a Taiwan blue magpie perched on a leafy green branch as a gift for their first meeting, a bird unique to the island, Taiwan’s presidential office said.
“As any political pro would say, the optics of the visit could prove very important to the message that emerges”. “People in Taiwan are not interested and no matter what he does it is going to fail”.
Taiwan air force jets escort a plane out of Taiwan airspace carrying Taiwan’s President Massachusetts Ying-jeou from Taiwan to Singapore for a meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping, Saturday, November 7, 2015. It comes after a closed-door meeting between China and a Vatican delegation in Beijing in October – the second round of discussions since Pope Francis restarted talks with communist China, drawing attention from Catholics across the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan has long had the security backing of the United States, which is bound by an act of legislation to defend Taiwan if it is attacked.
The U.S. will be closely watching the presidential meeting.
After defeat by the Communists during the civil war in 1949, the Nationalist Chinese government under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, and since then relations between China and Taiwan have been one of the biggest flashpoints in the region.
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In Taiwan previous year, large protests erupted against an agreement to expand trade with the mainland, and the governing Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, which favors closer ties with China, has plummeted in popularity and is widely expected to lose the presidency and possibly the legislature in January elections. The Communist Party in turn has never acknowledged Taiwan’s right to rule itself.
