China has threatened “resolute countermeasures” over a planned meeting between Taiwanese President, Tsai Ing-wen and United States House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy during an upcoming visit in Los Angeles by the Head of the self-governing island democracy.
Tsai is scheduled to transit through New York on March 30, 2023, before heading to Guatemala and Belize. On April 5, 2023, she is expected to stop in Los Angeles on her way back to Taiwan, at which time the meeting with McCarthy is tentatively scheduled.
Diplomatic pressure against Taiwan has ramped up recently, with Beijing poaching its dwindling number of diplomatic allies while also sending military fighter jets flying toward the island on a near daily basis. Earlier this month, Honduras established diplomatic relations with China, leaving Taiwan with only 13 countries that recognize it as a sovereign state.
On Wednesday, March 29, 2023, Spokesperson for the Cabinet’s Taiwan Affairs Office, Zhu Fenglian at a news conference denounced Tsai’s stopover on her way to diplomatic allies in Central America and demanded that no U.S. officials meet with her.
“We firmly oppose this and will take resolute countermeasures,” Zhu stated.
The U.S. should “refrain from arranging Tsai Ing-wen’s transit visits and even contact with American officials, and take concrete actions to fulfill its solemn commitment not to support Taiwan independence,” Zhu added.
Transit visits through the United States during broader international travel by the Taiwanese President have been routine over the years, senior U.S. officials in Washington and Beijing have underscored to their Chinese counterparts.
In such unofficial visits in recent years, Tsai has met with members of Congress and the Taiwanese diaspora and has been welcomed by the Chairperson of the American Institute in Taiwan, the U.S. government-run nonprofit that carries out unofficial relations with Taiwan.
Tsai transited through the United States six times between 2016 and 2019 before slowing international travel with the coronavirus pandemic. In reaction to those visits, China lashed out rhetorically against the U.S. and Taiwan.
However, the planned meeting with McCarthy has triggered fears of a heavy-handed Chinese reaction amid heightened frictions between Beijing and Washington over U.S. support for Taiwan, trade and human rights issues.
McCarthy Confirms Meeting With Tsai
U.S House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has said that he would meet with Tsai when she is in the U.S. and has not ruled out the possibility of traveling to Taiwan in a show of support.
Beijing sees official American contact with Taiwan as encouragement to make the island’s decades-old de facto independence permanent, a step U.S. leaders say they donot support.
Former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was the highest-ranking elected American official to visit the island since then-Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1997. Under the “One China” policy, the U.S. acknowledges Beijing’s view that it has sovereignty over Taiwan, but considers Taiwan’s status as unsettled. Taipei is an important partner for Washington in the Indo-Pacific.
U.S. officials are increasingly worried about China attempting to make good on its long-stated goal of bringing Taiwan under its control by force if necessary. The sides split amid civil war in 1949 and Beijing sees U.S. politicians conspiring with Tsai’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party to make the separation permanent and stymy China’s rise as a global power.
The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which has governed U.S. relations with the island, does not require Washington to step in militarily if China invades but makes it American policy to ensure Taiwan has the resources to defend itself and to prevent any unilateral change of status by Beijing.
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