- Taiwan hits back at Elon Musk’s claim that it is ‘part of China’
- Beijing’s policy has been to sort of reunite Taiwan with China,” said the Tesla CEO, who claimed he understands China “well.”
- Musk’s comments were made in response to a question about the challenges faced by American businesses in China.
- Taiwan’s defence ministry has said in the past 24 hours it had detected 40 Chinese air force aircraft entering the island’s air defence zone.
- Taiwan’s democratically elected government strongly rejects China’s sovereignty claims.
This is not the first time Elon Musk, whose Tesla firm had a large factory in Shanghai, has irritated Taiwan. Last October he suggested tensions could be resolved by handing over some control of Taiwan to Beijing.
Taiwan has insisted it is “not for sale” in response to Elon Musk’s claim the country was an integral part of China.
The billionaire owner of social media platform X, the Starlink satellite network and Tesla, made the comments at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles this week.
” Beijing’s policy has been to reunite Taiwan with China,” Mr Musk said. “From their standpoint, maybe it is analogous to Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China mostly because the US Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification effort by force,” he said.
However, Taiwan’s foreign minister Joseph Wu, in a post on X, said he hoped Musk could ask China to open the billionaire’s social media platform to its people. China blocks X, along with other major Western social media sites like Facebook.
He was referring to Mr Musk refusing a Ukrainian request to activate his Starlink satellite network in Crimea’s port city of Sevastopol last year to aid an attack on Russia’s fleet there. “Listen up, Taiwan is not part of the People’s Republic of China & certainly not for sale!” Mr Wu added.
Musk visited China earlier this year, where he held court with numerous government officials and visited Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai. In April, he announced plans for a new battery factory in the city. During his May visit, Musk said he was opposed to the idea of a US-China decoupling amid geopolitical fissures, calling the interests of both countries “intertwined like conjoined twins.”
Tesla is deeply reliant on China, with deliveries from the Shanghai facility accounting for more than half of its global sales. The electric carmaker is bullish on the world’s biggest auto market, though it has encountered issues there. In recent years, some Chinese government ministries have banned the company’s vehicles from entering their premises over purported security fears. The electric vehicle maker has also slashed prices for its cars in China several times this year, reigniting a price war in the industry, where it is in second place behind market leader BYD.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s defence ministry has said in the past 24 hours it had detected 40 Chinese Air Force aircraft entering the island’s air defence zone, mostly flying into the Bashi Channel. At least four of the aircraft also crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait to the northwest of the island.
Taiwan’s democratically elected government strongly rejects China’s sovereignty claims and says only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.
(With inputs from agencies)
