KAOHSIUNG: China views the annexation and “elimination” of Taiwan as its fantastic regional cause, Taiwan President Lai Ching- te said on Sunday, telling cadets at the military’s top academy they may know their enemy and never give in to defeatism.
Lai has faced sustained personal attacks from China, which views Taiwan as its own territory, since assuming office last month, with Beijing calling him a” separatist”. China staged warfare games around Taiwan immediately after Lai’s opening.
Lai claims that Taiwan’s citizens are the ones who can determine their coming, and he has frequently pressed Beijing for talks but had been turned down.
On the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Whampoa Military Academy, Lai said yesterday’s recruits must acknowledge the issues of the “new era.” Speaking in Kaohsiung, in the south of the island, Lai said.
” The biggest problem is to confront the strong rise of China, which is ) destroying the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and sees Taiwan’s invasion and the removal of the Republic of China as the excellent rejuvenating reason of its people,” he said, using Taiwan’s proper name.
On Sunday, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office received inquiries for comments about Lai’s remarks.
Wang Huning, the fourth-ranked leader of the Chinese Communist Party, stated at a forum in China on Saturday about relations with Taiwan that “reunification is a historical necessity for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” promising to” smash any separatist plots.”
The cadets must protect Taiwan from being annexed by China, Lai said at the event, where senior military officials and Neil Gibson, the top U.S. diplomat in Kaohsiung, must speak, and that the island’s future can only be decided by its citizens.
We must be able to tell the difference between ourselves and our enemies and between friends and enemies, and we must not accept the deception of” the first battle is the last battle,” Lai said, citing a theory that Taiwan might collapse as soon as China launches any attack.
More than a decade after the founding of the Republic of China, which overthrew the previous emperor, the academy was established in Guangzhou, then known as Canton in English.
After the defeated Republican government fled to the island in 1949 at the conclusion of a civil war won by Mao Zedong and his communist forces, it was established with the assistance of the Soviet Union to give China a professional military loyal to the nascent state. It later moved to Nanjing, Chengdu, and finally Kaohsiung.
China claims that Taiwan’s declaration of its full independence would be grounds for an island attack. Taiwan is already a Republic of China, according to the government in Taipei, and it does not intend to alter that.
