Taiwan criticizes Elon Musk for his recent statements regarding China

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwan’s foreign minister said Taiwan is “not for sale” in a sharp rebuke to Elon Musk, who has maintained that Taiwan is an integral part of China, as the billionaire waded once again into the thorny issue of relations between the two countries. Beijing and Taipei.

Musk, owner of the social media platform

“Their (Beijing) policy has been to reunify Taiwan with China. From their perspective, it’s probably the same as Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that’s not part of China arbitrarily mostly because … the United States is in the periphery.” “The Pacific Fleet has stopped any kind of reunification effort by force.”

Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, in a post on X’s website late Wednesday, responded that he hoped Musk would ask China to “open up @X to its people.” China blocks X, along with other major Western social media like Facebook.

“Maybe he thinks banning it is good policy, like stopping @Starlink to thwart Ukraine’s counterstrike against Russia,” Wu added, referring to Musk rejecting a Ukrainian request to activate his Starlink satellite network in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol last year to help. Attack on the Russian fleet there.

“Listen, Taiwan is not part of the People’s Republic of China and certainly not for sale!” Wu said, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

Taiwan’s democratically elected government strongly rejects China’s claims to sovereignty, and says only the people of Taiwan can decide their future.

This is not the first time that Musk, whose Tesla had a large factory in Shanghai, has drawn the ire of Taiwan.

Last October, he suggested that tensions between China and Taiwan could be resolved by handing over some control of Taiwan to Beijing, drawing a similarly strong rebuke from Taiwan.

(This story has been reworded to add the dropped word “from” in paragraph 1)

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