Integrated development between Chinese mainland and Taiwan is possible, professor says

The integrated development between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan is both possible and feasible, said a Taiwan native living in Shanghai.

"The distance and misunderstanding between people across the Taiwan Straits can be eliminated," Lu Li-an, an English literature professor from Fudan University in Shanghai, told reporters on the sidelines of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

"We are now living in 2017, not 1927, 1937 or 1947. We should be confident and brave to abandon the outdated and confrontational ideology. If we really care about Taiwan and Taiwan people's wellbeing, what we say should be in line with what we do," Lu said.

"We love Taiwan and are also able to love the motherland," she said, while repeating the sentence in the Minnan language, a dialect used in Taiwan and Fujian province.

As a native born and raised in Taiwan, Lu said she found out that Marxism and feminism are highly respected thoughts when she studied abroad.

She also said that people in Taiwan and the mainland both look forward to a prosperous life and she came to this conclusion from her own family experience.

"My grandfather, who was born and raised in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, spoke the Minnan language and studied in Japan. But he loved Peking Opera."

By reading history, Party history and 20 years experience of living in the Chinese mainland, she shared with reporters that "we cannot choose history, but can hold today and work toward the future."