Risking China’s anger, U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday as a “nice good friend of America” in a fraught show of U.S. support at a rare high-level, bipartisan meeting on U.S. soil.
Speaking carefully to avoid unnecessarily escalating tensions with Beijing, Ms. Tsai and Mr. McCarthy steered clear of calls from hard-liners in the U.S. for a more confrontational stance toward China in defence of self-ruled Taiwan.
Instead, the two leaders stood side by side in a show of unity at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, acknowledging China’s threats against the island government but speaking only of maintaining longstanding U.S. policy.
“America’s support for the people of Taiwan will remain resolute, unwavering and bipartisan,” Mr. McCarthy said at a news conference later.
Peace through strength
He evoked Reagan’s peace-through-strength approach to foreign relations and emphasised “this is a bipartisan meeting of members of Congress,” not any one political party. He said U.S.-Taiwan ties are stronger than at any other point in his life.
He and Ms. Tsai spoke to reporters with Reagan’s Air Force One as a backdrop.
She said the “unwavering support reassures the people of Taiwan that we are not isolated.”
Still, the formal trappings of the assembly, and the senior rank of a number of the elected officers within the delegation from Congress, threatened to run afoul of China’s place that any interplay between U.S. and Taiwanese officers is a problem to China’s declare of sovereignty over the island.
More than a dozen Democratic and Republican lawmakers, together with the House’s third-ranking Democrat, joined Republican McCarthy for the daylong talks.
Self defence
During a non-public session they spoke of the significance of Taiwan’s self-defence, of fostering sturdy commerce and financial ties and supporting the island authorities’s means to take part within the worldwide neighborhood, Ms. Tsai mentioned.
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen meets U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, U.S. April 5, 2023.
| Photo Credit:
Reuters
They made no point out of calls from hard-liners out and in of Congress for a higher U.S. dedication to Taiwan’s protection if China ought to assault.
Ms. Tsai mentioned she pressured to lawmakers Taiwan’s dedication “to defending the peaceful status quo where the people in Taiwan may continue to thrive in a free and open society.”
But she additionally warned, “It is no secret that today the peace that we have maintained and the democracy which have worked hard to build are facing unprecedented challenges.”
“We once again find ourselves in a world where democracy is under threat and the urgency of keeping the beacon of freedom shining cannot be understated.”
Key provider
The United States broke off official ties with Taiwan in 1979 while formally establishing diplomatic relations with the Beijing government. The U.S. acknowledges a “one-China” policy in which Beijing lays claim to Taiwan, but it does not endorse China’s claim to the island and remains Taiwan’s key provider of military and defense assistance.
For Ms. Tsai, this was the most sensitive stop on a weeklong journey meant to shore up alliances with the U.S. and Central America. The U.S. House speaker is second in line of succession to the president. No speaker is known to have met with a Taiwan president on U.S. soil since the U.S. broke off formal diplomatic relations.
China has reacted to past trips by Taiwanese presidents through the U.S., and to past trips to Taiwan by senior U.S. officials, with shows of military force. After then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan last August, China responded with its largest live-fire drills in decades, including firing a missile over the island.
Sharp response
Chinese officials have pledged a sharp but unspecified response to the meeting with McCarthy.
Later Wednesday, China said it “firmly opposes and strongly condemns” Ms. Tsai’s visit, in a statement by China’s official Xinhua News Agency.
China will take “resolute and forceful measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the statement said, citing an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesperson. It urged the U.S. “not to walk further down the wrong and dangerous road.”
There was no sign of a large-scale military response as of Thursday morning as China had done previously.
Chinese vessels were engaged in a joint patrol and inspection operation in the Taiwan Strait that will last three days, state media said Thursday morning. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said Wednesday evening it had tracked the China’s Shandong aircraft carrier passing through the Bashi Strait, to Taiwan’s southeast.
The Biden administration insists there is nothing provocative about this visit by Ms. Tsai, which is the latest of a half-dozen to the U.S.
“Beijing shouldn’t use the transits as an excuse to take any actions, to ratchet up tensions, to additional push at altering the established order,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Wednesday during travel in Europe.
Rising U.S.-China tensions
The Taiwan president’s visit to America comes as China, the U.S. and its allies are strengthening their military positions and readiness for any confrontation between the two sides, with Taiwan and its claim to sovereignty a main flashpoint.
Confrontation between the U.S. and China, a rising power increasingly seeking to assert its influence abroad under President Xi Jinping, surged with Ms. Pelosi’s visit and again this winter with the cross-U.S. journey of what the U.S. says was a Chinese spy balloon.
Democratic Rep. Pelosi said in a statement, “Today’s assembly between President Tsai of Taiwan and Speaker McCarthy is to be counseled for its management, its bipartisan participation and its distinguished and historic venue.”
Taiwan and China cut up in 1949 after a civil warfare and don’t have any official relations, though they’re linked by billions of {dollars} in commerce and funding.
For their half, Taiwanese officers within the United States – and Taiwanese presidents on a succession of visits – goal for a fragile steadiness of sustaining heat relations with their highly effective American allies, with out overstepping their in-between standing within the U.S, or unnecessarily upsetting China.
To that finish, no Taiwanese flag flies over the previous Taiwan Embassy in Washington. Taiwanese presidents name their stops within the U.S. “transits” reasonably than visits, they usually avoid Washington.
Mr. McCarthy, the newly elected House speaker, is making an early foray into overseas coverage.
Joining him for the assembly had been the Republican chairman and rating Democrat on a brand new House Select Committee on China, together with the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee that handles tax coverage vital to Taiwan, amongst others.
Seated to McCarthy’s proper was the third-ranking House Democrat, Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, who spoke of the lengthy historical past of U.S.-Taiwan cooperation and an “overwhelming bipartisan commitment” in Congress, working with the Biden administration, to strengthen the connection.
Source: www.thehindu.com
