Days after Beijing concluded live-fire military exercises near the island, Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te pledged to protect the sovereignty of the self-governing island against China’s “expansionist ambitions.”
In his New Year’s speech on Thursday, Lai stated, “The international community is watching to see whether the Taiwanese people have the resolve to defend themselves in the face of China’s rising expansionist ambitions.
As president, my approach has always been straightforward: to resolutely safeguard national sovereignty, strengthen national defence and the resilience of the whole society, and fully construct an effective deterrence and democratic defence mechanism,” he stated. Lai’s remarks were made a few days after China concluded two days of exercises around the island that included aircraft, warships, and rocket launches.
China has threatened to take Taiwan by force if necessary since it views Taiwan as a renegade portion of its own territory. Taiwan, a former Japanese colony, has been run separately from the mainland since 1949, when the Nationalist Party withdrew to the island after losing a civil war to the Chinese Communist Party.
Beijing reacted fiercely to Lai’s address, calling the president “a saboteur of peace, a troublemaker and a warmonger,” according to a spokesman for the State Council’s Taiwan Affairs Office, as reported by the official Xinhua news agency.
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