Chinese President Xi Jinping said China would “surely be reunified” with Taiwan during his televised New Year’s address, renewing Beijing’s threats to take over the self-ruled island, which it considers its own.
Taiwan split from China amid civil war in 1949, but Beijing continues to regard the island of 23 million with its high-tech economy as Chinese territory and has been ramping up its threat to achieve that by military force if necessary.
“China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose,” Xi said in his annual address, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
China has described Taiwan’s Jan. 13 presidential and parliamentary elections as a choice between war and peace.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Taiwan split from China amid civil war in 1949, but Beijing continues to regard the island of 23 million with its high-tech economy as Chinese territory and has been ramping up its threat to achieve that by military force if necessary.
“China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose,” Xi said in his annual address, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
China has described Taiwan’s Jan. 13 presidential and parliamentary elections as a choice between war and peace.
Beijing considers the presidential front-runner, William Lai, who currently serves as vice president from the ruling Democratic People’s Party, a “separatist” and has accused him and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen of trying to provoke a Chinese attack on the island.
On Saturday, Chen Binhua, spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, called Lai a “destroyer of peace” following a televised debate earlier that day in which Lai defended Taiwan’s right to rule itself as a democracy.
Chen said Lai’s discourse at the debate was “full of confrontational thinking,” adding that the vice president is “the instigator of a potential dangerous war in the Taiwan Strait.”
The original article contains 310 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 36%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Taiwan didn’t split from the mainland. The mainland was conquered in the Civil War and the communists declared themselves victor over everything.
Taiwan was never captured.
I mean, it’s more complicated than that. Both declared themselves victor. Mainland went communist. The west couldn’t live with that so they propped up to authoritarian govt of Taiwan and ignored the communist government for 30 years, funding the murder of hundreds of thousands of dissidents. They couldn’t “capture” it without dragging themselves into the US’s cold war fever.
It’s only been the last 40 years that Taiwan has become democratic, and only the last 10-20 that the parties who wanted unification started to lose elections. Even then they keep wavering back and forth in elections some trying to tie more to China and some trying to break off entirely afaict.