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China’s Xi Jinping ramps up threats against Taiwan – warning ‘reunification’ is inevitable | World News<\/p>\n
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Chinese President Xi Jinping has said in his televised New Year address that his country’s “reunification” with Taiwan is inevitable, renewing Beijing’s threats to take over the self-ruled island.<\/p>\n
Taiwan<\/strong> split from China<\/strong> amid civil war in 1949, but Beijing<\/strong> continues to regard the island of 23 million people as its territory.<\/p>\n In recent years, Mr Xi<\/strong> and his officials have been ramping up military pressure to assert its sovereignty claims over democratically governed Taiwan.<\/p>\n “China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose,” Mr Xi said in his annual address to mark the new year.<\/p>\n Though the president made no mention of military threats in his speech, China has never renounced using force to bring Taiwan under Chinese control.<\/p>\n Taiwan is holding its presidential and parliamentary elections on 13 January amid a time of increasingly fraught relations between Beijing and Taipei.<\/p>\n Beijing considers the presidential front-runner, William Lai, from the ruling Democratic People’s Party, who currently serves as vice president, a “separatist” and has accused him and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen of trying to provoke a Chinese attack on the island.<\/p>\n On Saturday, Chen Binhua, spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, called Mr Lai a “destroyer of peace” following a televised debate earlier that day in which Mr Lai defended Taiwan’s right to rule itself as a democracy.<\/p>\n Mr Chen said Mr Lai’s discourse at the debate was “full of confrontational thinking”, adding that the vice president is “the instigator of a potential dangerous war in the Taiwan Strait”.<\/p>\n While Mr Lai does not describe himself as seeking independence from Beijing, he generally maintains that Taiwan is already an independent country.<\/p>\n Click to subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts<\/strong><\/p>\n His election rivals include Hou Yu-ih, from the more China-friendly Kuomintang Party, and Ko Wen-je, from the Taiwan People’s Party.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin<\/strong> made only a passing mention to Ukraine<\/strong> in his New Year address on Sunday, instead hailing his soldiers as “heroes” who are “at the forefront of the fight for truth and justice”.<\/p>\n