Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated Beijing’s threats to annex the self-governing island, which it regards as its own, when he declared during his televised New Year’s speech that China would “certainly be reunified” with Taiwan.
Taiwan broke away from China in 1949 during a civil war, but Beijing still considers the 23 million-person island with a high-tech economy to be part of its territory, and it has been escalating its threat to use military force if needed to do so.
“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 mentioned in his annual address, as quoted by Xinhua News Agency.
Beijing views William Lai, the front-runner for president and vice president of the ruling Democratic People’s Party, as a “separatist” and has charged both he and Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, with attempting to incite an invasion by the Chinese on the island.
After Lai defended Taiwan’s right to govern itself as a democracy in a televised discussion earlier that day, Chen Binhua, a spokeswoman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, referred to Lai as a “destroyer of peace” on Saturday.
The vice president is “the instigator of a potentially dangerous war in the Taiwan Strait,” according to Chen, who also described Lai’s speech during the discussion as “full of confrontational thinking.”
