BEIJING, Oct 2 – Novosti. A delegation of German parliamentarians led by the chairman of the parliamentary group in charge of relations with Taiwan, Klaus-Peter Wilsch, arrived in Taiwan on Sunday, the first visit by members of the Bundestag to the island since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, the Foreign Ministry said on Sunday. Taiwan.
“Vice Foreign Minister Yu Dalei warmly welcomed the first German delegation since the start of the pandemic,” the ministry’s official Twitter account said in a statement. The department wished the delegation, headed by Klaus-Peter Wilsch, “a fruitful five-day visit.”
Earlier, the island’s Foreign Ministry reported that the delegation would stay on the island until October 6.
As noted in the department, Germany became the second European country after France , which sent a delegation to Taiwan after the August escalation of tension on both sides of the Taiwan Strait as a result of a visit to Taipei by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi .
The delegation plans to meet with the head of the administration of the island Tsai Ing-wen , her deputy William Lai, visit the Legislative Yuan (parliament), as well as visit think tanks and organizations dealing with security issues.
The situation around Taiwan escalated significantly after the visit to the island in early August of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. China , which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi’s visit, seeing the move as US support for Taiwanese separatism, and held large-scale military exercises.
Official relations between the central government of the PRC and its island province were interrupted in 1949, after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in a 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 Foundation.
