China renewed its threat to attack Taiwan on Thursday after nearly a week of war games near the island. Taiwan has called Beijing’s claims of self-governing democracy “wishful thinking” and launched its own military exercises.
“Taiwan’s collusion with external forces to seek independence and provocation will only hasten its own demise and push Taiwan into the abyss of disaster,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in a statement. daily briefing.
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“Their pursuit of Taiwan’s independence will never succeed, and any attempt to sell the national interest will be a complete failure,” Wang told reporters.
China’s attempt to intimidate the Taiwanese public and announce its strategy to block and potentially invade the island was nominally prompted by a visit to Taipei last week by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The US, Japan and their allies have denounced the drills, and the Group of Seven industrialized nations issued a statement at a recent meeting expressing concern.
On Wednesday, the British government summoned Chinese ambassador Zheng Zeguang to the Foreign Office to demand an explanation of “Beijing’s aggressive and wide-ranging escalation against Taiwan.”
Taiwan says Beijing used Pelosi’s visit as a pretext to raise the stakes in its feud with Taipei, firing missiles into the Taiwan Strait and over the island into the Pacific Ocean. China also sent planes and ships across the median line to the strait that has long been a buffer between the sides, which split amid civil war in 1949.
In a lengthy political statement on Taiwan issued on Wednesday, China distorted the historical record, including the 1972 United Nations resolution that transferred China’s Security Council seat from Beijing to Taipei, the Council said Taiwan Cabinet-Level Mainland Affairs. The Chinese statement also discarded a pledge not to send troops or government officials to Taiwan that was included in previous statements.
The UN resolution makes no mention of Taiwan’s status, although China considers it a founding document proclaiming the Communist Party’s right to control the island.
The Taiwanese council’s statement said China was orchestrating its moves against Taiwan ahead of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party, which will be held later this year. President and party leader Xi Jinping is expected to receive a third five-year term at the conclave, after leading a relentless crackdown on political figures accused of corruption, human rights activists and civil society groups.
Xi’s suppression of free speech and political opposition in Hong Kong was also seen as a factor in Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen winning a second term in 2020.
China says it plans to annex Taiwan under the now-much-discredited “one country, two systems” format applied to Hong Kong. The concept has been roundly rejected in Taiwanese public opinion polls in which respondents have overwhelmingly favored the status quo of de facto independence.
The Chinese statement is “full of wishful thinking and ignores the facts,” the Mainland Affairs Council said in its press release.
The Beijing authorities’ “crude and clumsy political operations further expose their arrogant thought pattern of trying to use force to invade and destroy the Taiwan Strait and regional peace,” the statement said.
“The Beijing authorities are deceiving themselves. We warn the Beijing authorities to immediately stop threatening Taiwan with force and spreading false information,” he said.
Taiwan put its military on high alert during the Chinese drills, but did not take direct countermeasures. It held artillery drills on its southwest coast facing China that lasted Thursday, illustrating the challenges the People’s Liberation Army would face if it launched a cross-strait invasion.