China is to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Taiwan’s “retrocession” to Chinese rule, Beijing said yesterday, while sources told Reuters that the event was scheduled for this weekend in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.
Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Deputy Minister and spokesman Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) on Thursday last week said that the government prohibits civil servants from joining activities organized by Beijing celebrating the so-called “retrocession” of Taiwan.
The MAC also urges officials, teachers and people in the private sector to observe regulations governing cross-strait ties by not attending Chinese “united front” activities, he said.
Photo: CNA
China and Taiwan use the term “retrocession” to refer to Taiwan’s 1945 handover by Japan, which colonized Taiwan in 1895, to the Republic of China (ROC) government, a transfer whose anniversary falls on Saturday.
“Taiwan’s retrocession stands as a significant achievement of the victory in the war of resistance,” Zhu Fenglian (朱鳳蓮), a spokesperson for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, told reporters in Beijing yesterday, referring to World War II.
“It was a great triumph forged through the relentless and bloody struggles of all Chinese people, including our compatriots in Taiwan, and deserves to be commemorated jointly by compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” Zhu said.
China would hold an anniversary celebration and invite people from Taiwan to attend, she added, but did not state a date or say which Chinese leaders would attend.
Taiwan and China have repeatedly clashed this year over their differing interpretations of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Taiwan says it was the ROC that fought the war, not the People’s Republic of China (PRC), founded by Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Chinese Communist Party in 1949 after it won the Chinese Civil War.
Three diplomatic sources told Reuters that China had sent invitations for the event, scheduled for Saturday in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, but it lacked details of who would address the meeting.
The sources spoke on condition of anonymity as the matter is a sensitive one.
Taipei says that Taiwan was handed to the ROC, not the PRC, which did not exist at the time.
Beijing says that as the successor state to the ROC, it has a right to claim Taiwan as its own territory.
Taiwan says that is nonsense as the ROC still exists.
At the last such anniversary event in 2015, Yu Zhengsheng (俞正聲), at the time China’s fourth-ranked leader, gave a speech and foreign representatives also attended.
As the MAC last week said Beijing was trying to distort history for its own ends, Zhu in return said that Taiwan was trying to “distort and deny the historical facts” of World War II, and “intimidate and suppress” Taiwanese from attending related Chinese events.
China held a massive military parade for last month’s anniversary of the end of World War II.
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