Curtains closed yesterday on a five-day political opera staged in Taipei, which hosted its most senior guest from China since 1949 when the communists drove the Kuomintang (KMT) forces from the mainland to Taiwan.

The guest, Mr Chen Yunlin, China's top cross-strait envoy, took a bow to thank the police for protecting him from rowdy protesters before returning to Beijing yesterday morning.

He declared his mission done, and told his Taiwanese counterpart Chiang Pin-kung that both sides had 'days ahead of us yet'.

Mr Wang Yi, China's top Taiwan affairs official, said the historic visit benefited both sides, gave impetus to the peaceful development of cross-strait ties and built a platform for enhancing mutual understanding.

On Monday, Mr Chen had landed on the island with a delegation of some 60 people, bearing gifts that promised to lift Taiwan out of its economic gloom.

Taiwanese businessmen have long crossed the strait to sniff out where the money is, but could not enjoy the advantage of proximity with no direct flights or shipping routes between the island and the mainland.

Mr Chen's visit changed this.

On Tuesday, he signed pacts with Mr Chiang to normalise the flow of people and goods between the two sides.

The start of everyday flights, cargo, shipping and postal links will inevitably pull the two sides closer together.

It is a milestone in the troubled waters of the Taiwan Strait, and comes almost 20 years after the Taiwanese were first allowed to travel to the mainland in 1987.

That was also the year that Taiwan shook off martial law and set off on the path of democracy.

Indeed, the cross-strait issue and democracy are closely linked in Taiwan, which has sought to carve out its own identity by distancing itself from the communist mainland.

The cross-strait issue, not the classic left-right political spectrum, has dominated Taiwan politics since the 1980s, noted scholars Chu Yun-han of Academia Sinica and Andrew Nathan of Columbia University.

'Despite the efforts of some politicians over the years to highlight issues such as the welfare state, labour rights and economic redistribution as well as post-materialist issues such as women's rights, clean politics and the environment, the cross-strait issue has dominated electoral and party politics since democratisation started in the 1980s,' they said in a paper on prospect for change for cross-strait ties which they co-authored.

The two organisations in the news this week - China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait and Taiwan's Straits Exchange Foundation - were set up in the early 1990s as a semi-official conduit for Beijing and Taiwan to talk.

Singapore provided the stage for their first meeting in 1993, but the path of rapprochement never did run smooth.

China's Mr Wang Daohan and Taiwan's Mr Koo Chen-fu, the late predecessors of Mr Chen and Mr Chiang, had to wait until 1998 before they met again in China.

This time round, Mr Chen has fulfilled Mr Wang's unfulfilled mission of visiting Taiwan, which was planned for 1999 but aborted after the island's then-president Lee Teng-hui angered Beijing with his 'special state-to-state' theory.

Cross-strait rapprochement languished in the last eight years when the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was in government.

When Mr Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT was elected president in March, cross-strait ties took a great leap forward, with resumption of cross-strait talks in Beijing in June, and in Taipei this week.

But not every Taiwanese sees Mr Chen's visit as a sign of progress. Surveys have consistently shown that about a third are opposed to thawing ties with China.

Indeed, some rejected the scripted 'Peking opera' that was meant to be the main event at the palatial Grand Hotel, and devised their own street theatre.

The first was a grand but sedate affair, which required viewers to pay close attention to fleeting gestures and words. The other show went off script, with its bloody outbursts and frenzied blows between law enforcers and protesters.

Demonstrations, albeit more peaceful ones, continued yesterday, with a few hundred students staging a sit-down protest in front of the Executive Yuan yesterday. They took issue with what they saw as the over-zealous police clampdown.

Overall, Mr Ma got some flak for this week's protests, for not doing enough to sooth unease over his China policies. But public polls placed the blame mainly on DPP chief Tsai Ing-wen, who promised supporters this: 'We'd meet often on the streets!'

Scholars lamented the protests - one of the worst in years - and asked if Taiwan's democracy had regressed.

Political commentator Nanfang Shuo said: 'If the DPP can't give up its strategy of street violence, Taiwan's democracy would simply become a joke!'

Street protests in the 1970s and 1980s in Taiwan had stood for democratic ideals, but this week's sound and fury underlined the opposition's desperation.

For all the agitation about sovereignty, even the opposition recognised Taiwan's need for trade and transport links with China.

Instead, protesters have limited their objections largely to Mr Ma's poor performance over the economy, and procedural issues like whether flags of the Republic of China - Taiwan's formal title - would be displayed before Mr Chen.

As a result, most analysts are cautiously optimistic about the path ahead for cross-strait reconciliation, even though as Mr Ma noted, differences between the two sides still exist, especially over Taiwan's security and international space.

Professor Chao Chun-shan of Tamkang University said: 'These differences can't be solved in a matter of days, but the talks are a good start. Precisely because of the long and winding road both sides have taken in the past, this is something to be treasured.'

hoaili@sph.com.sg