The Chinese embassy in Berlin has slammed German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock for her comments regarding the conflict with Taiwan, accusing her of "insinuations," a "deliberate distortion of facts" and interference in internal affairs.
The statement published on Friday referred to remarks made by Baerbock on Monday while in New York to attend the 10th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
"We do not accept when international law is broken and a larger neighbour invades its smaller neighbour in violation of international law - and this of course also applies to China, especially in these days," Baerbock had said.
In view of the "brutal Russian war of agression" against Ukraine, it was important to stress that it was unacceptable for the world community when a larger country attacked a weaker neighbour, she said.
In its statement, China's embassy in Germany said that such remarks lacked "any historical knowledge" and did not correspond to the facts.
Taiwan wasn't a smaller neighbour of China but a Chinese province, it said. Meanwhile, the issue of Taiwan was an internal Chinese matter and "to equate the question of Ukraine with the question of Taiwan is a deliberate distortion of facts and an interference in China's internal affairs."
In the statement, the embassy also criticized the recent visit by Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, as well as statements made by the EU and the G7 leading industrialized nations on the matter.
The European countries should consider carefully whether they want to continue to support "the dangerous and provocative actions of the US" and thus "drag the world into a swamp of confrontations," the embassy wrote.
The communist leadership of the People's Republic claims Taiwan is a part of China and maintains that reunification with the mainland is inevitable.
The 23 million inhabitants of Taiwan, on the other hand, see themselves as independent.
The conflict dates back to the Chinese Civil War, when the Kuomintang Chinese Nationalist government fled from China to Taiwan after losing to the Communists, who founded the People's Republic of China in Beijing in 1949.
Taiwan has been a self-ruled democracy ever since, but Beijing considers the island part of China and has threatened to conquer it to achieve what it calls reunification.
In line with its "One China principle", China strictly rejects official contact between Taipei and other nations. Due to pressure from Beijing, only a few, mostly smaller states have diplomatically recognized the island republic.
