BEIJING (Reuters) -Taiwan President Lai Ching-te is “prostituting” himself to foreigners to try and win their favour but his schemes are doomed to fail, China’s government said on Wednesday after he gave an interview lauding U.S. President Donald Trump.
China, which views democratically-governed Taiwan as its own territory, has a special dislike of Lai, saying he is a “separatist” and rebuffing his repeated offers of talks. Lai says only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.
In an interview released this week with a conservative U.S. radio show and podcast, Lai said Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize if he could convince Chinese President Xi Jinping to abandon use of force against Taiwan. Trump and Xi are expected to meet this month at a regional summit in South Korea.
Responding to the interview, where Lai also talked about China’s military threats and increased defence spending, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said Lai was “spouting nonsense”, showing his true nature as a manufacturer of crises and destroyer of peace.
Since taking office last year, Lai has been “rampantly propagating separatist fallacies”, it said.
Using unusually strong wording, the statement added: “He has engaged in unprincipled foreign pandering and bottomless selling out of Taiwan, squandering the flesh and blood of the people, prostituting himself and throwing in his lot with foreign forces”.
There was no immediate response from Taiwan’s government.
The Chinese statement said efforts to seek independence through relying on foreign forces were doomed to fail.
“Lai Ching-te and the ‘Taiwan independence’ forces are but ants shaking a tree: they will ultimately be swept into the dustbin of history,” it added.
The statement also comes just two days before Lai gives his key national day speech on Friday.
China, which has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control, staged a day of war games around the island last year shortly after that same event in what it said was a warning to “separatist acts”.
Lai says that the Republic of China – Taiwan’s formal name – and the People’s Republic of China are “not subordinate to each other”.
The Republic of China government fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war with Mao Zedong’s communists. No peace treaty has ever been signed and neither government officially recognises the other to this day.
(Reporting by Beijing newsroom; Writing and additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Kim Coghill)
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