Taiwan not part of China
It is disappointing that Alexi Sanders trumpets support for Beijing instead of the 23 million freedom and democracy-loving Taiwanese (Letter, Feb. 18, page 8).
Taiwanese do not want Taiwan to become a second Hong Kong. The British Government is partly responsible for the situation in the territory and is completely irresponsible and inhumane.
It has no right to sign a treaty with Beijing to indicate that “Taiwan is a part of China.”
Why can British and French governments not treat Taiwan in the same manner as they treated the US after it gained independence? Taiwan has all the elements of a nation.
The British government has fallen into Beijing’s trap of inducing foreigners and foreign governments to acknowledge the false claim that “Taiwan is a part of China.”
If Taiwan were a part of China, would Beijing have 1,600 missiles aimed at Taiwan? China does not have a single missile aimed at Hainan Island, neither has China ever told foreigners that Hainan is its territory.
Many foreigners mistakenly think that Taiwan split from China after the Chinese Civil War.
However, Taiwanese were not involved in the civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). After the KMT’s defeat, more than 1 million of its members, including soldiers and refugees, fled to Taiwan, which had a population of 6 million at the time.
According to the San Francisco Peace Treaty signed by 48 nations in 1951 and the 1952 Treaty of Taipei, Japan simply abandoned Taiwan after a 50-year rule.
Neither the Republic of China nor the People’s Republic of China owns Taiwan. Taiwan is a free, democratic homeland to 23 million Taiwanese.
Charles Hong
Columbus, Ohio
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