Japan is threatening China militarily which is “completely unacceptable”, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his German counterpart, after Japan said that Chinese fighter jets had aimed their radar at Japanese military aircraft.
Japan has denounced the encounter as a dangerous act, though China has blamed Japan for sending aircraft to repeatedly approach and disrupt the Chinese navy as it was conducting previously announced carrier-based flight training east of the Miyako Strait.
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Relations have soured in the past month since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi warned that Japan could respond to any Chinese military action against Taiwan if it also threatened Japan’s security.
Speaking during a meeting with German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul in Beijing on Monday, Wang said that given this year is the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two, Japan, “as a defeated nation”, should have acted with greater caution.
“Yet now, its current leader is trying to exploit the Taiwan question – the very territory Japan colonised for half a century, committing countless crimes against the Chinese people – to provoke trouble and threaten China militarily. This is completely unacceptable,” Wang said, according to China’s official Xinhua news agency.
Japan ran Taiwan as a colony from 1895 to 1945, and at the end of the war it was handed over to the Republic of China government, which then fled to the island in 1949 after losing a civil war with Mao Zedong’s communists.
Wang said that Japan’s “current leader recently made reckless remarks on hypothetical situations on Taiwan”.
Taiwan’s status as Chinese territory has been “unequivocally and irreversibly affirmed by a series of ironclad historical and legal facts”, he added.
Taiwan’s government, which rejects Beijing’s territorial claims, has repeatedly accused China of misrepresenting history, saying the People’s Republic of China did not exist in 1945. Republic of China remains Taiwan’s formal name.
Wang said that as the People’s Republic of China was the successor state to the Republic of China, it “naturally” enjoys sovereignty over Taiwan.
Speaking in Taipei, Taiwan Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hsiao Kuang-wei said the island “absolutely was not” part of the People’s Republic of China and has never been ruled by them.
“Only Taiwan’s democratically elected government can represent the 23 million people of Taiwan in the international community and in multilateral settings,” he added.
Asked about Beijing’s justification of its use of radar on Japan’s military jets at the weekend, Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara repeated Tokyo’s stance disputing China’s characterisation of the incident.
“The intermittent illumination of radar beams is a dangerous act that goes beyond what is safe and necessary,” he told a news conference on Tuesday.
He declined to confirm media reports that Beijing had not responded to Japan’s calls during the incident on a bilateral hotline that had been set up in 2018.
Reporting by Beijing newsroom; Additional reporting by Chang-Ran Kim in Tokyo and Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Stephen Coates and Jacqueline Wong
