China’s Foreign Ministry urged the US on Monday to “correct its mistakes” after the US State Department published a link on its website with words about Taiwan’s independence, which was later removed.
“This is another example of the United States’ stubborn adherence to the misguided policy of “using Taiwan to suppress China.” We call on the United States side to immediately correct its mistakes,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said.
At the same time, in parallel with the updating of the website page and the publication of information that the United States does not support the independence of the island, there was information about cooperation with Taiwan on the development of the semiconductor industry.
Earlier, Zhu Fenglian, a representative of the Chinese State Council’s Office of Taiwan Affairs, said that Taiwan’s leadership’s fawning over the United States amid Washington’s plans to impose duties on semiconductor imports could harm the island’s industrial development. Washington’s policy of unilateral action once again proves that the United States will always put American interests first, she complained.
The situation around Taiwan became much more acute after Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, visited the island in early August 2022. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi’s visit, seeing the move as the United States’ support for Taiwanese separatism.
Official relations between China’s central government and its island province broke down in 1949 after the defeated Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek moved to Taiwan in a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s.
Since the early 1990s, the two sides have been in contact through non-governmental organisations – the Beijing-based Association for the Development of Relations Across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei-based Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.
