Elon Musk drew a stern rebuke from Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for asserting that Taiwan was an “integral part of China” and likening the self-ruling island to China’s Hawaii.
Beijing’s policy “has been to reunite Taiwan with China,” he said in a live-streamed speech at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles earlier this week, adding that as an outsider of China, he “understand[s] China well,” having met with the “senior leadership at many levels of China for many years.”
“From their standpoint, maybe it’s analogous to Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China mostly because the U.S. Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification effort by force.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has claimed Taiwan as part of Chinese territory and hasn’t ruled out using force to exercise authority over the island. Hawaii, a U.S. territory since 1898, became the 50th U.S. state in 1959.
Commenting on a clip of Mr. Musk’s remarks on the billionaire’s social media platform, X, Taiwan’s foreign minister Joseph Wu said he hopes Mr. Musk “can also ask the CCP to open X to its people.”
“Listen up, Taiwan is not part of the PRC [and] certainly not for sale!” Mr. Wu said, using the acronym for the country’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.
Jeff Li, the Taiwanese foreign ministry spokesman, was also unusually blunt during a Thursday press briefing, saying that Mr. Musk has been “currying favor with China” while ignoring the lack of freedom of speech in the country.
“We can’t tell whether Musk’s free will is for sale, but Taiwan is not for sale, that’s for sure,” he said.
The entrepreneur, whose Tesla has a major factory in Shanghai, made the comments in response to a question about challenges to U.S. businesses in the country.
It wasn’t his first time angering Taiwan. Last October, stating that conflict over Taiwan is inevitable, Mr. Musk suggested that Taiwan can resolve cross-strait tensions by handing some control to the mainland and turning itself into “a special administrative zone.”
“As China confronts serious economic and demographic issues, Xi Jinping could get more risk accepting, and could get less predictable and do something very stupid,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who chairs the House select committee on competition with China, said at a Council on Foreign Relations event in New York earlier this week.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on Monday told at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfighter Symposium that China was building up its military to ready itself for a potential war with the United States.
The military incursions came a day after China sailed its naval formation led by the aircraft carrier Shandong, China’s first domestically built carrier, some 60 nautical miles southeast of Taiwan on its way to military drills in the western Pacific.
Chinese authorities in the meantime have also been trying to pull Taiwan further into its economic orbit.
On Sept. 14, the regime unveiled measures to convert Fujian, a coastal Chinese Province sitting opposite Taiwan, into an integrated development zone with improved access for Taiwanese enterprises—a step that Taiwan saw as the latest Chinese attempt to “win over” Taiwanese money and mind.
“This is totally wishful thinking,” the Mainland Affairs Council said.
