[1/3]Taiwanese Vice President William Lai waves at Taoyuan International Airport after his flight to the United States and Paraguay, in Taoyuan, Taiwan August 18, 2023. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rollins/File Photo Acquisition of licensing rights
TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwanese Vice President William Lai said in broadcast remarks after China carried out military exercises across the island in anger at his visit to the United States this month.
Lai, the front-runner in opinion polls to be Taiwan’s next president in January’s election, stopped in the United States this month on his way to and from Paraguay, sparking anger in Beijing, which sees him as a dangerous separatist given China’s territory. claims on the island.
In the past 24 hours, 25 aircraft of the Chinese Air Force have crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, which served as an unofficial barrier between the two sides until Chinese military aircraft began crossing it regularly a year ago, Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense said Sunday morning.
This included Su-30 and J-11 fighter jets, according to a map released by the ministry, though there was no indication that China was continuing its exercises on Sunday.
Taiwan officials have said China is likely to conduct military exercises near the island, using Lai’s stopover in the United States as an excuse to intimidate voters ahead of next year’s presidential election and make them “afraid of war”.
In an interview broadcast late Saturday with a Taiwanese television station while in New York last weekend, Lai said China does not decide who wins the election.
“It’s not who China likes today, and then they can take over. This goes against the spirit of democracy in Taiwan, and is a huge destruction of Taiwan’s democratic system,” he said.
Lai said China should not “make a fuss about nothing” when it comes to overseas travel for Taiwan’s leaders.
“My position is that Taiwan is not part of the People’s Republic of China. We are willing to engage with the international community and talk to China under the guarantee of security.”
For many years, he said, China wanted to “annex” Taiwan and that is not something that started under the ruling Democratic Progressive Party government, referring to the battles along the Chinese coast in the 1950s when China captured islands controlled by Taiwan.
“This election is not a choice between peace and war. We cannot order from the list, choose peace and then there is peace, choose war and then there is war. That is not the case. What is is that we have the right to choose whether we want democracy or tyranny. That is. The real choice we have to make is in this election.”
China demanded that the Taiwan government accept that both sides of the Taiwan Strait are part of “one China”, but it refused.
Low drills
Saturday’s exercises by China were far less significant than two rounds of war games around Taiwan last August and again in April this year. Now China and the United States are trying to re-engage, especially since Chinese and American leaders may meet at a regional summit in San Francisco later this year.
Alexander Neill, a Singapore-based defense analyst, said China appeared to be calibrating the scale of the exercises to prove a point but not to spoil the broader diplomatic effort.
“I think after the recent bilateral engagement, China probably doesn’t want to rock the boat too much before APEC in San Francisco,” said Neil, an adjunct fellow at the Pacific Forum in Hawaii.
However, China made clear an intense dislike of Lai and unwillingness to back down on Taiwan, including with comments in state media criticizing Lai as a “liar” and “separatist”.
China’s Eastern Theater Command, on its official WeChat account, posted a short video late Saturday of a map of Taiwan superimposed with three slogans: “Relying on the United States is an evil path,” “Seeking independence is a dead end,” and “Unification is the right path.” .
On Sunday, the Taiwanese navy released video footage of its sailors on the guided-missile frigate Tian Dan waving the Chinese frigate Zhouzhou, which it said was taken Saturday in the sea south of Taiwan.
And the Taiwanese military also published pictures of one of its fighter planes taking off and a pilot examining a missile under the plane.
The United States urged China on Saturday to stop putting pressure on Taiwan.
“We urge Beijing to cease its military, diplomatic and economic pressure on Taiwan and instead engage in meaningful dialogue with Taiwan,” a State Department spokesman told Reuters in a statement.
The statement said the United States will continue to monitor the exercises closely.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard). Additional reporting by Greg Torode and James Pomfret in Hong Kong. Editing by William Mallard, Kim Coghill, and Edmund Kelman
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