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China slams Taiwan

president's speech

BEIJING: An official Chinese commentary has accused Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui of attempting to provoke and coerce the nationalist island into following a separatist path.

The commentary, carried late Friday by the Xinhua news agency, criticised Lee for a speech in which he put forward the idea of creating a "common community of 21 million lives in Taiwan."

"This is just one of the many fallacies that Lee Teng-hui has been spreading both inside and outside Taiwan," said the commentary - the latest in a series of personal attacks on Lee that followed his controversial "private" visit to the United States in June.

The text stipulated that Lee's concept of a common community was basically an attempt to deny that Taiwan is an integral part of China by emphasising the island's particular historical situation.

"His preaching is merely an attempt to provoke or coerce the people of Taiwan into taking the separatist path along with him," it said, adding that such a course meant putting the interests, future and lives of the people in Taiwan at stake.-AFP