Taiwan: Wei Leijie’s Case for a "Once-in-a-Century" Deal with Trump

"It is better to endure the inevitable short-term pain of reunification than to subject national rejuvenation to the endless torment of delay and the uncertainty of an indefinite future."

Wei Leijie (魏磊杰) is not a name Sinification’s readers will recognise from the usual bench of PRC “Taiwan hands”. A professor of law at Xiamen University—better known for his work on the politics and sociology of law, comparative legal culture and the rule of law under CCP leadership—Wei has published little on cross‑Strait relations. Yet his institutional affiliation matters. Xiamen University houses one of the mainland’s flagship Taiwan‑focused research ecosystems, and China’s debate on cross-Strait dynamics has been drifting steadily towards legal and normative engineering: further cracking down on “Taiwan independence” advocates, expanding “administrative enforcement” through grey-zone tactics or sketching pathways for post‑reunification governance. In that context, it is perhaps unsurprising that a law scholar steps into a field traditionally dominated by political scientists and international relations specialists.

Wei’s essay picks up and develops some of the major threads runnin…