Taiwan is urging Australia to send a military attaché to the island, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said.
⠀
“I think it’s very important that the Australian government pays much more attention to regional security issues so that the two countries can share their observations, their assessment of the situation,” Wu said.
⠀
According to the newspaper, the United States, Japan and Singapore have long placed their attaches on the island in order to maintain contact with Taiwanese intelligence agencies.
⠀
Wu added that Taiwan also wants to send a military attaché to the Canberra mission.
⠀
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.
⠀
The situation around Taiwan escalated significantly after a visit to the island in early August 2022 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.
