Taipei, Taiwan:
Chinese President Xi Jinping warned that relations involving Beijing and Taipei have been “grim” on Sunday, urging the island’s major opposition party to assist seek “unification of the country.”
China views self-ruled democratic Taiwan as element of its territory and vows to retake it one day, by force if vital.
Xi has develop into the most bellicose leader because Mao Zedong, describing the seizure of the island as “inevitable.”
In a congratulatory letter to Eric Chu — the newly elected leader of the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) party — Xi mentioned the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT must collaborate below a “shared political basis.”
“In the past our two parties insisted on ‘1992 consensus’ and opposing ‘Taiwan independence’ … to promote peaceful developments in cross- strait relations,” Xi mentioned in the letter released by the KMT.
“At present the situation in the Taiwan Strait is complex and grim,” he mentioned, urging the parties to jointly seek peace and “the unification of the country.”
Ties involving Taiwan and China enhanced markedly below former president Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT involving 2008 and 2016, culminating with a landmark meeting involving Xi and him in Singapore in 2015.
The KMT has side-stepped frictions with China by accepting the so-referred to as 1992 consensus — a tacit agreement that there is only “one China” devoid of specifying no matter if Beijing or Taipei is its rightful representative.
In response, Chu mentioned in a letter to Xi that the two sides must “seek common ground and respect their differences” to market peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.
Beijing has stepped up military, diplomatic and financial stress on Taiwan because the 2016 election of President Tsai Ing-wen, who views the island as a sovereign nation and not element of “one China.”
Last year, Chinese military jets made a record 380 incursions into Taiwan’s defence zone, with some analysts warning that tensions involving the two sides have been at their highest because the mid-1990s.
On Thursday, China flew 24 warplanes which includes two nuclear-capable bombers into Taiwan’s air defence zone, the greatest incursion in weeks, immediately after voicing its opposition to Taipei joining a key trans-Pacific trade deal.
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