By Ben Blanchard

TAIPEI (Reuters) -Aggression only leads to defeat and as authoritarianism once again gathers strength, it is important that freedom and democracy prevail, Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said on Friday marking the end of World War Two, in a pointed message to Beijing.

Taiwan has this year sought to cast the war as a lesson to China, which views the democratic island as its own territory, to show how aggression will end in failure, and to remind the world it was not the government now in Beijing that won the war.

The Chinese government at the time was the Republic of China, part of the U.S., British and Russian-led alliance, and its forces did much of the fighting against Japan, putting on pause a bitter civil war with Mao Zedong’s Communists whose military also fought the

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