Taiwan’s newly inaugurated president William Lai has called on China to stop threatening the island and accept the existence of its democracy.
He urged Beijing to replace confrontation with dialogue, shortly after being sworn in on Monday.
He also said Taiwan would never back down in the face of intimidation from China, which has long claimed the island as its own.
China responded by saying, “Taiwan independence is a dead end”.
“Regardless of the pretext or the banner under which it is pursued, the push for Taiwan independence is destined to fail,” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at the daily press briefing on Monday afternoon.
As of a few years ago at least, most Taiwanese people were in favour of keeping relations as they are and neither expanding nor severing Chinese relations from status quo. They already operate as their own country, so a push towards further separation is mostly only symbolic anyway and they don’t want to provoke China and their current peace for a symbolic gesture. I think that by treating Taiwan as its own country but not identifying it as such, we are acting as most Taiwanese wish.