Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) eponymous Ma Ying-jeou Foundation spent NT$5 million (US$159,990) to bring 31 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) students and six accompanying CCP personnel to Taiwan for a nine-day exchange visit, arriving on July 15 and leaving on Sunday.
The delegation can fairly be called a CCP group because the 37 participants were selected by China, with Peking University CCP party secretary Hao Ping (郝平) leading the group and all the student participants being members of the Communist Youth League. This trip was not something that ordinary Chinese students had a fair chance of joining.