Vice Chairman of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, former Prime Minister Taro Aso called on Japan, the US and Taiwan to “ready to fight.”
⠀
Aso is visiting Taiwan. He delivered a speech at an international forum in Taipei.
⠀
“Japan, Taiwan, America and other friendly countries are required to be ready to use powerful deterrence forces. There is no other such era. Readiness to fight. If something happens, we will use (deterrent forces). To protect Taiwan, to stabilize the Taiwan Strait, we will use. To convey a clear intention to a partner is the force of deterrence,” NHK TV channel quotes a fragment of Aso’s speech.
⠀
Aso also recalled that following US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last year, China conducted a large-scale exercise in which several missiles landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone, Kyodo news agency reported.
⠀
“Peacetime is gradually turning into a time of emergency,” he said, and also called the Kishida government’s plans to strengthen the country’s defense capabilities “an unshakable deterrent to prevent war.”
⠀
The situation around Taiwan escalated significantly after a visit to the island in early August last year by then-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi’s visit, seeing in this move US support for Taiwanese separatism, and held large-scale military exercises.
⠀
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, defeated in a civil war with the Communist Party of China, 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.
