Ben Blanchard and Anne Wang
KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan (Reuters) – China sees the annexation and “elimination” of Taiwan as a national cause, Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te said on Sunday, telling cadets at the island’s top military academy they must know the enemy and not succumb to defeatism.
Since taking office last month, Lai has faced constant personal attacks from China, which considers Taiwan its territory and has called him a “separatist.” China conducted military drills around Taiwan shortly after Lai took office.
Lai has said only the Taiwanese people can decide Taiwan’s future, and has repeatedly offered to meet with Beijing but has been rebuffed.
Speaking in Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of Whampoa Military Academy, Lai said today’s cadets must be aware of the challenges of the “new era”.
“The biggest challenge is to confront the powerful rise of a China that is destroying the status quo across the Taiwan Strait and seeing the annexation of Taiwan and the elimination of the Republic of China as the cause of the great rejuvenation of the Taiwanese people,” he said, using Taiwan’s official name.
The Taiwan Affairs Office of China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to calls seeking comment on Lai’s remarks on Sunday.
Wang Huning“Unification is a historic necessity for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” Tsai Ing-wen, the Communist Party’s fourth-ranking leader, said at a forum on ties with Taiwan in China on Saturday, vowing to “smash any separatist plots.”
Speaking at the event, which was also attended by senior military officials and Neil Gibson, the U.S. diplomat in Kaohsiung, Lai said the cadets must protect Taiwan from being annexed by China and that its future can only be decided by its people.
“We must be able to distinguish between our enemies and our country, and between our allies and our enemies. Defeatism that ‘the first battle is the last battle’ is absolutely unacceptable,” Lai said, referring to the theory that Taiwan could quickly collapse if China launches an attack.
The academy was founded in Guangzhou, China, then known as Canton in English, in 1924, more than a decade after the founding of the Republic of China, which overthrew the last emperor.
Founded with Soviet backing to create a professional military loyal to the new China, it relocated 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 Communist forces.
China claims any move by Taiwan to formally declare independence would give it grounds to attack the island, while Taipei maintains that Taiwan is already an independent country under the name of the Republic of China and has no intention of changing that.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Ann Wang; additional reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by William Mallard)
