If China wants Taiwan it should also take back land from Russia, president says

2/9/2024 11:47

        If China's claims on Taiwan are about territorial integrity then it should also take back land from Russia signed over by the last Chinese dynasty in the 19th century, Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said in an interview with Taiwanese media.
        
        China views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan's government rejects those claims, saying only the island's people can decide their future.
        
        Speaking in an interview with a Taiwanese television station broadcast late on Sunday, Lai, who China calls a "separatist", brought up the 1858 Treaty of Aigun in which China signed over a vast tract of land in what is now Russia's far east to the Russian empire, forming much of the present day border along the
        Amur River.
        
        China's Qing dynasty, then in terminal decline, originally refused to ratify the treaty but it was affirmed two years later in the Convention of Peking, one of what China refers to as the "unequal" treaties with foreign powers in the 19th Century.