BEIJING, Oct 20 - RIA Novosti. The likelihood of a war between mainland China and Taiwan within the next year is very small, Chen Mingtong, director of the island's national security bureau, said on Wednesday.
"The probability of the outbreak of hostilities between mainland China and Taiwan within a year is very small," the Taiwanese Central News Agency quoted Chen Mingtong as saying.
This statement was made during a meeting of the Parliamentary Defense committee.
Earlier, Taiwan's Defense Minister Qiu Guozheng said that mainland China will have all the possibilities for a full-scale invasion of Taiwan by 2025, he also pointed out that the current situation in the Taiwan Strait area is the most tense in the last 40 years. His statement came after the People's Liberation Army of China (PLA) sent a total of almost 150 military aircraft to the shores of Taiwan in the first week of October.
As stated earlier by the official representative of the Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China for Taiwan Affairs Ma Xiaoguang, the exercises near Taiwan are aimed at ensuring state sovereignty and against separatist activities and external interference.
Official relations between the central government of the People's Republic of China and its island province were interrupted in 1949, after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, who were defeated in the civil war with the Communist Party of China, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties began to contact through non-governmental organizations – the Beijing Association for the Development of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Fund.
