By Ben Blanchard and Ann Wang
KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan (Reuters) – China sees 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 they must know your enemy and do not give in to him. defeatism.
Lai has faced continued personal attacks from China, which views Taiwan as its own territory, since taking office last month, with Beijing calling him a “separatist”. China organized war games around Taiwan soon after Lai took office.
Lai says only the people of Taiwan can decide their future and has repeatedly offered negotiations with Beijing but has been rebuffed.
Speaking in Kaohsiung, in the south of the island, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Whampoa Military Academy, Lai said today’s cadets must recognize the challenges of the “new era”.
“The biggest challenge is to face the powerful rise of China, (which is) destroying the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and regards 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 Huningthe fourth leader of China’s 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,” promising to “crush any separatist conspiracies.”
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 annexation by China and that the island’s future can only be decided by its people.
“We must truly 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 battle’,” Lai said, referring to the theory that Taiwan could collapse as soon as possible. while China launched any attack.
The academy was founded in Guangzhou, China – then known in English as Guangzhou – in 1924, more than a decade after the establishment of the Republic of China, which overthrew the last emperor.
Created with help from the Soviet Union to give China 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 won civil war. 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 claims that Taiwan is already an independent country, the Republic of China, and that it does not intend to change that.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Ann Wang; additional reporting by Beijing newsroom; editing by William Mallard)
