Chinese President Xi Jinping ended the year with a threat to Taiwan, saying “no one can stop unification” with China. He said this while addressing the nation on New Year’s Eve. Beijing has long maintained that all of Taiwan is part of China. It has also shown a clear and strong posture by conducting air force and naval exercises around the island nation.
Beijing and Taipei represent two diametrically opposite ways of life. While Taiwan is a democracy, China is a communist country. In recent days, Beijing has increased pressure on Taipei and made every effort to isolate the island nation from the rest of the world.
China has also held three rounds of major military exercises since President Lai Ching-te came to power following Taiwan’s democratic elections in May. Angered by the latest elections, Beijing has said that it will not abandon the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control. The last military drills earlier this month were the largest in years according to Taiwanese officials, although Beijing has remained silent on the maneuvers. China has also violated Taiwan’s airspace several times.
In his New Year speech, Chinese President Xi Jinping said, “The Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family. No one can break our blood ties, and no one can stop the historical trend of reunifying the motherland.” Could.” President Xi’s comments come at a critical time – just three weeks before Donald Trump takes office as US President.
Taiwan is a major point of contention between Beijing and Washington. Taiwan is a strategic ally of the US in Asia and Washington is also Taiwan’s largest arms supplier. Protecting democracy over communism has also been a principled decision of the United States – the Cold War with Russia was based entirely on this principled stance.
A Brief History of China and Taiwan
China and Taiwan are separated by the Taiwan Strait – a waterway that connects the South China Sea to the East China Sea between the two countries.
Before the Communist Revolution under the leadership of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, China was a democratic nation for some time. What was then known as the Republic of China (now the official name of Taiwan) had three presidents. The Republic of China became a sovereign nation after the fall of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty in 1912. This ended the imperial history of China.
China saw four governments between 1912 and 1949 – the Provisional or Interim Government in 1912, the Beiyang Government from 1912 to 1928, led by the military; Nationalist government from 1925 to 1948, led by the Kuomintang; and constitutional government from 1948 to 1949. Civil war in China led to the overthrow of the constitutional government. The Communist Party, led by Chairman Mao, overthrew the government in a crushing revolution, which later spread to Tibet and Xinjiang. The constitutional government had to flee to Taiwan.
Between the mid-1920s and the late 1930s, the Kuomintang basically controlled China (without the currently occupied nation of Tibet, and then Xinjiang (part of the Republic of East Turkistan) in the west and Soviet-controlled Manchuria in the east. ) – the region separating the rest of Russia and Mongolia from present-day North Korea). Russia ceded southern Manchuria to Japan in 1905 due to the Russo-Japanese War, and decades later, in 1931, Japan occupied all of Manchuria. Subsequently, Japan invaded China during World War II.
The Kuomintang was led by Chiang Kai-shek, who was elected President of the Republic of China until Mao Zedong’s revolution forced him and his Kuomintang party to flee to Taiwan in 1948 and establish a government-in-exile in 1949. By 1971, Chiang Kai-shek’s government was recognized as the legitimate government of China. It was Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (Taiwan) that originally received a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Taiwan is a democracy today, but many countries in the world do not have diplomatic relations with it due to pressure from the People’s Republic of China – which was led by Chairman Mao’s party since 1949 and is currently led by Xi Jinping.
