Taiwan Fires Back after Elon Musk Calls It ‘Integral Part of China’

The Taiwanese government fired back at Elon Musk after he called the island country “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China” on a recent podcast.

“Hope @elonmusk can also ask the #CCP to open @X to its people. Perhaps he thinks banning it is a good policy, like turning off @Starlink to thwart #Ukraine’s counterstrike against #Russia,” Taiwanese foreign minister Joseph Wu said today on X, which Musk owns.

“Listen up, #Taiwan is not part of the #PRC & certainly not for sale!”

Musk recently went on the All-In podcast, a show hosted by venture-capital executives, when he made the comments echoing the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda line.

Musk said that because he has met with “senior leadership at many levels in China,” he has “a pretty good understanding” of the country for an outsider.

“The fundamental thing here is really Taiwan. China has really since for half a century or so — longer at this point — their policy has been to reunite Taiwan with China. From their standpoint, maybe it is analogous to, like, Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China — mostly because the U.S. Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification-effort force.”

The idea that Taiwan was once part of China, and that an attempt to annex it would be a reunification effort, features heavily in CCP propaganda about the island’s future. The Chinese regime has never ruled over Taiwan.

In his tweet today, Wu also referred to recent reports that Musk had limited the Ukrainian military’s access to Starlink as Kyiv planned an attack on Russian forces that, Musk believed, would lead to a catastrophic escalation of the war. Musk’s work to provide Starlink to Ukraine has significantly bolstered Kyiv’s ability to continue its fight against Russia.

The Taiwanese foreign minister’s post today marks the first time that Taiwan has voiced concern about Musk’s noteworthy ties to and praise of the CCP. Previously, Taiwanese officials have dodged questions about whether Taipei would seek access to Starlink in anticipation of a potential Chinese attack.

Taiwanese digital-affairs minister Audrey Tang demurred last year when a National Review reporter asked about Starlink’s potential role in the construction of a satellite network through which Taiwan could maintain contact with the world during a crisis.

Musk has previously praised Beijing, where, as he noted during the podcast episode, Tesla has a significant footprint — including a showroom in the Xinjiang region, where Beijing is carrying out genocide against the Uyghurs.

On the 100th anniversary of the CCP’s founding, Musk praised China, raving in a tweet about “the economic prosperity that China has achieved.”

In 2021, Musk took China’s then–ambassador to the U.S. Qin Gang on a drive in a Tesla vehicle and later participated in an event that Qin hosted. This year, after the Chinese official was appointed foreign minister, Musk met him in Beijing. The Chinese-government summary of the meeting said that Musk had said “the interests of the United States and China are interlinked, like conjoined twins inseparable from each other.”