Taiwan’s vice president and front-runner to be the island’s next president, William Lai, is in the eye of the storm after China launched widely expected drills near Taiwan in an angry response to his brief visits to the United States this month.
While Lai has repeatedly said ahead of January’s election that he wants to keep the status quo with China, which claims Taiwan as its own, and offered to talk to Beijing, the Chinese government has only reacted with hostility.
But in China’s view, Lai is a separatist and “troublemaker through and through”, for comments he first made in 2017 as premier about being a “worker” for Taiwan’s independence, a red line for Beijing.
In 2018, the then premier told parliament he was a “practical worker for Taiwan independence”, causing one Chinese newspaper, the widely-read Global Times, to call for China to issue an international arrest warrant for Lai and prosecute him under China’s 2005 Anti-Secession Law.
Lai said at the time and many times since he simply meant Taiwan is already an independent country, and on the campaign trail stuck by President Tsai Ing-wen’s line that the Republic of China, Taiwan’s formal name, and the People’s Republic of China are “not subordinate to each other”.
Taiwan’s constitution states that the Republic of China is a sovereign state, and that has been a consensus shared by all Taiwan’s main political parties. The Republic of China government fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war with Mao Zedong’s communists, who set up the People’s Republic of China
Lai Journey
Lai became vice president in 2020, standing as Tsai’s running mate where they won a landslide victory after warning of the threat to Taiwan from China given Beijing’s crackdown on anti-government protests in Hong Kong.
Since then, China has massively ramped up military drills near Taiwan and held two rounds of war games, last August and in April this year, in response to Taiwanese engagement with the United States.
China has rebuffed even the gentlest approaches by Lai.