China Accuses Taiwan Leader of Moving Toward Independence

China on Sunday accused President Lee Teng-hui of rival Taiwan of plotting to declare the island an independent nation and of revealing his plans during a private visit to the United States last month.

Lee’s U.S. trip has enraged Beijing, sending Sino-U.S. relations into a nose dive and prompting China to announce and carry out missile tests just north of Taiwan in an apparent direct military threat to the island.

“The 1.2 billion Chinese people have long made up their minds never to allow the plot of ‘the independence of Taiwan’ in any form to succeed,” the official New China News Agency said in a commentary. “Should Lee Teng-hui continue to go down along that dangerous road in defiance of the will of the people, he would certainly be utterly discredited and stand condemned by the Chinese nation through the ages,” it said.

It accused Lee of betraying his early membership of the Communist Party and later its rival, the Nationalist Party, which he now heads in Taiwan, and of secretly promoting independence for the island.

Both Beijing’s Communist rulers and the Nationalist Party in Taiwan advocate reunification of the island with mainland China, but differ over how to achieve their end.

Beijing has regarded Taiwan as a rebel province since the Nationalists fled there after losing the civil war in 1949.