Chinese Defense Minister vows to thwart efforts to achieve Taiwan independence

Chinese Defense Minister Colonel General Wei Fenghe. File photoBEJING, Jun 10The Chinese People's Liberation Army will thwart any attempt to gain Taiwan independence, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe said Friday at a meeting with Pentagon Chief Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue international security conference in Singapore. «The government and the army China will resolutely suppress any attempts to achieve independence for Taiwan, as well as adamantly uphold the reunification of the motherland,» Wei Fenghe said, quoted by PRC Central Television. «Recently, the United States again announced the sale of weapons to Taiwan, this causes serious damage to China's sovereignty and security interests, Beijing strongly opposes and strongly condemns this,» the Chinese Defense Minister said. «Taiwan is Chinese Taiwan, and the One China principle, in turn, is the political foundation of US-China relations. It will not be possible to use Taiwan to control China,» Wei Fenghe added. Earlier this week, the US agency The Defense Security Cooperation Council reported that the US State Department has approved a possible sale of $120 million worth of ship parts and ship systems to Taiwan to help it maintain its ships. As noted in the department, this measure «will not change the basic military balance in the region.» Official relations between the central government of the PRC and its island province were interrupted in 1949, after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, who were defeated in a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties began to contact through non-governmental organizations — the Beijing Association for the Development of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation. ready to start a small nuclear war over Taiwan