« Taiwan independence means war". It is in these very unequivocal terms that Wu Qian, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Defense of the People's Republic of China, concludes this Friday, January 29, a briefing to the Chinese press concerning the maneuvers and repeated exercises carried out by the People's Liberation Army, its air and naval forces, in the Taiwan Pass and the China Sea in recent days. He added that as long as the DDP, the independence party in power since 2016 on the island, would continue to refuse the reintegration of Taiwan into China, tensions with Taipei and its allies will increase.
This statement marks a new threshold in Beijing's semantics about Taiwan, but also in its military posture. Every month now, while it is obvious that the Taiwanese themselves are mostly hostile to a return to Beijing's fold, Chinese authorities move threat cursor, so as to always keep under control both the aspirations of the island's population to declare their independence officially, as well as their possible support from outside, in particular the United States. But what is presented by the Chinese authorities as a response to provocations, sometimes from Taipei, sometimes from the United States or the West, turns out to be in fact a strategy methodically applied by Xi Jinping since his accession to power. in 2013.
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