Chinese and Taiwanese officials have “exchanged their point of view on municipal issues, such as culture, sport and tourism”. At the same time, the head of the Tsai Ing-Wen state, announces strengthening its military links with the United States.
MO12345lemonde with AFP
The first Chinese delegation to visit Taiwan since the start of the Cavid pandemic received a “warm welcome”, said Taipei town hall on Monday, February 20, which is led by the Kuomintang party, more favorable to a rapprochement with the China that the Progressive Democratic Party of President Tsai Ing-Wen.
The six members of the Chinese delegation, arrived from Shanghai on Saturday, met the mayor of the Taiwanese capital, Chiang Wan-An, Kuomintang member (KMT). This visit comes after a series of recent exchanges between Beijing and the island of Taiwan, which is preparing for the presidential election of 2024.
Chinese and Taiwanese officials “exchanged their point of view on municipal issues, such as culture, sport and tourism … The Shanghai delegation also said that it had received a warm welcome”, underlined the town hall of Taipei in a statement on Monday. Due to political tensions between Taiwan and China, exchanges were limited before the pandemic.
Beijing claims democratic island as part of its territory and has intensified military, diplomatic and economic pressure since the election of the president Tsai ING-Wen in 2016.
difficult balance
The question of whether this visit was a sign of warming from Sino-Taiwanese relations, the manager of the Shanghai delegation, Li Xiaodong, replied on Sunday: “We are impatiently awaiting it”. “But it is impossible to obtain a radical change only through a working group like mine. The two parties must work together,” he abounded. In this context of warming on Tuesday, the President of the Republic of China (known as Taiwan) announced that the island would strengthen its military ties with the United States. “Taiwan would cooperate even more actively with the United States and other democratic partners to deal with international challenges such as authoritarian expansionism and climate change”.
The vice-president of KMT, Andrew HSIA, recently made a nine-day trip to China, where he called for more direct flights and the lifting of imports on imports. Last year, Beijing prohibited imports of Taiwanese fruit and fish, in retaliation for the visit to the island in August in Nancy Pelosi, then president of the House of Representatives of the United States.
After this official trip of the American representative, Sino-Taiwanese relations had reached their lowest point, Beijing having in the era retorted by gigantic military maneuvers around the island.
The head of the Taiwanese affairs office in Beijing, Song Tao, assured Andrew Hsia that the Chinese Communist Party was ready to work with the KMT to promote relations based on the principle of rejection of independence of the independence of the independence of the independence of the independence of the independence of the independence of the independence of The island, according to the official Chinese news agency Xinhua.