TAIPEI: On Sunday, December 3, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen urged voters to consider what had happened to Chinese-controlled Hong Kong when they cast their ballots the following month, saying that peace must be backed up with a dedication to strengthen defenses.
As China intensifies military pressure to proclaim its claims, including two significant war games that have taken place around the island over the past year and a half, Taiwan gets ready for political and legislative elections on January 13.
The Kuomintang ( KMT ), the main opposition party in China and Taiwan, has chosen between war and peace in the election. China despises Lai Ching-te, the vice president of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party ( DPP ), and refers to them as dangerous separatists.
Tsai claimed that the criticism was using “alarmist talk” of war and peace when speaking to supporters at a Lai plan rally in Taipei.
I want to know if anyone in this room wants to go to battle. Anyone does, she claimed. ” Think of Taiwan as you look at Hong Kong.” We do not desire harmony in the manner of Hong Kong. We desire respectable harmony.
With the assurance of broad independence under a “one country, two systems” framework—which China has also offered to Taiwan—and much assist on the island, the former British colony of Hong Kong was returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
After the capital, a global economic hub, had been rocked for decades by occasionally violent anti-government and pro-China protests in 2019, Beijing imposed strict federal safety laws on Hong Kong in 2020, which it said was essential to restore balance.