Aohsiung. China views the annexation and “elimination” of Taiwan as its great national cause, Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said on Sunday, telling cadets at the top military academy that they must know their enemy and not give in to defeatism.
Lai has faced continued personal attacks from China, which considers Taiwan its own territory, since taking office last month, with Beijing labeling him a “separatist.” China organized war exercises in Taiwan shortly after Lai’s inauguration.
Lai says only the people of Taiwan can decide its future and has repeatedly offered talks with Beijing but has been rebuffed.
Speaking in Kaohsiung, in the south of the island, to mark the centenary of the founding of Whampoa Military Academy, Lai said today’s cadets must recognize the challenges of the “new era.”
“The biggest challenge is to confront the powerful rise of China, (which is) destroying the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and considers the annexation of Taiwan and the elimination of the Republic of China as the great cause of rejuvenating its people,” he said . using the formal name of Taiwan.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office did not respond to calls Sunday seeking comment on Lai’s comments.
Wang Huning, the fourth leader of China’s ruling Communist Party, told a forum Saturday in China on relations with Taiwan that “reunification is a historic necessity for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” vowing to “crush any separatist plots.” ».
Lai, at the event attended by senior military officers as well as the top US diplomat in Kaohsiung, Neil Gibson, said the cadets must defend Taiwan against China’s annexation and that the island’s future can only be decided by its people. .
“We really must be able to distinguish between ourselves and our enemies and between friends and enemies, and we absolutely cannot accept the defeatism of ‘the first battle is the last,'” Lai said, referring to the theory that Taiwan could collapse so soon as when China launched any attack.
The academy was founded in Guangzhou, China, then known in English as Canton, in 1924, more than a decade after the establishment of the Republic of China, which overthrew the last emperor.
Created with the help of the Soviet Union to provide China with a professional army loyal to the nascent state, it moved to Nanjing, Chengdu and finally Kaohsiung after the defeated Republican government fled to the island in 1949 at the end of a civil war. won by Mao Zedong and his communist forces.
China says any move by Taiwan to declare formal independence would be grounds for attacking the island. The Taipei government says Taiwan is already an independent country, the Republic of China, and it has no plans to change that.
INT/ag.agencias.rt.europapress/rp.
