The People’s Liberation Army also stepped up the number of sorties by aircraft around the island after Lai made the comments on Saturday at an event to mark the 30th anniversary of Taiwan’s first direct elections.

Lai, from the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, told the event that the early days of Kuomintang (KMT) rule over Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek were “worse than [under] the Japanese colonial regime”.

Taiwan held its first direct presidential election in 1996 after decades of martial law and single-party rule by the KMT.In his speech, Lai also made comparisons with some of the island’s other rulers. Apart from the Japanese, these included the Dutch and Spanish, and the mainland general Koxinga, also known as Zheng Chenggong, who made the island a base of resistance to the newly established Qing dynasty (1644-1911) – none of whom, Lai said, had ever really cared about Taiwan.

“Japan colonised Taiwan to promote the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’,” Lai said, referring to the wartime plan to establish a pan-Asian economic bloc under Japanese colonial rule.