Until 2020, the status quo played in favor of Beijing, which gradually managed to marginalize the island on the international scene. But the evolution of American policy as the remarkable management of CVIV-19 by Taipei has changed the game.
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Rarely the heirs of Sun Yat-sen, president of the first Republic of China have appeared as divided. This weekend, we celebrated on both sides of the Taiwan Strait 110 years of the Revolution which, on October 10, 1911, ended a multimillenary empire and led to the establishment of the Republic.
In Taiwan, the Republic of China even made its national holiday today. In Beijing, the National Day is celebrated on the 1 October, the day of the arrival of communists in power in 1949 but the leaders of the People’s Republic of China commemorate this previous revolution from 9 October, history to show their precedence on the authorities of the island they do not recognize independence.
Xi Jinping: The “reunification will have to be realized and will be”
Saturday, Xi Jinping, in the great palace of the people, blew the hot and cold. On the one hand he recalled, under the applause fed that the “reunification” of China and Taiwan “will have to be realized and will be” and that the “secessionists are the main obstacle to reunification with the motherland and a risk serious for national renewal “. For him, “Taiwan’s question was the result of the weakness and chaos of the Chinese nation and will certainly be resolved when the national renewal will become a reality”. “Those who forget their ancestors, betray the homeland or divide the country are condemned. They will definitely be rejected by the people and judged by history,” concluded the Chinese leader. It is especially this part of the discourse that has been taken over by the media.
yet, before, Xi Jinping had taken care to add that reunification “by peaceful means” will be “in the interest of the Chinese nation as a whole, including in the interest of our Taiwan compatriots” . He even used the term “peaceful” three times, which, after the 150 and some incursions of the Chinese army in the Taiwan Air Defense Identification Area since 1 . October may appear as a desire to lower the tension.
The next day, the President of the “Republic of China, Taiwan”, Tsai Ing-Wen, replied without the slightest ambiguity: “Taiwan must withstand the annexation or encroachment of his sovereignty” ” ‘Future of the Republic of China, Taiwan, must be decided in agreement with the will of the people of Taiwan, “she said.
Reaffirming his desire to maintain the status quo – neither the president nor any of his predecessors has never proclaimed the formal independence of the island – Tsai Ing-Wen estimates that “in the face of the expansion of the Autoritarianism “, Taiwan is” on the front line “to” defend democracy “. And she welcomed the importance of her country on the international scene: “In Washington, Tokyo, Canberra and Brussels, Taiwan is no longer [a subject] marginal,” she welcomed, before see that “the more we get results, the higher the pressure of China”.
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