House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) intention to meet Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is “sending wrong signals” to Taiwanese officials, according to a senior Chinese diplomat.
“We strongly oppose any form of official interaction and contact between the U.S. side and Taiwan authorities,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Monday. “Relevant U.S. congressman needs to abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiques, refrain from sending wrong signals to ‘Taiwan independence’ forces, and avoid undermining the China-U.S. relations and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.”
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Tsai and McCarthy decided to meet at the Reagan Library in California in an apparent effort to avoid the kind of crisis with China that erupted when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) landed in Taipei in August. Their carefully calibrated itinerary tests the ability of all sides to strike a balance between face-saving and the shared concern that any concession in one direction or another could set an unfavorable precedent.
“We’ve certainly seen some rhetoric coming out of Beijing [with] respect to President Tsai Ing-wen’s transit,” White House National Security spokesman John Kirby said Monday. “That rhetoric was not unexpected … there’s no reason for the Chinese to overreact here.”
Chinese Communist officials claim sovereignty over Taiwan, a democracy of immense strategic importance in the Indo-Pacific and the global economy, even though they have never ruled the island. The United States cut official diplomatic ties with the Taiwanese government in 1979 as a precondition for opening an embassy in Beijing, but Washington has retained a close unofficial relationship with its former treaty ally nonetheless, in keeping with federal law and “six assurances” that Ronald Reagan gave Taiwan, which are designed to avoid taking an official position on Taiwan’s status while discouraging Beijing from trying to subjugate the island.
That careful balance received a jolt when Pelosi visited, as Chinese forces staged a temporary partial blockade of the island, fired missiles over the island in the direction of Japan, and set a new precedent by conducting fighter jet sorties in Taiwan’s vicinity. McCarthy announced last year that he would visit Taiwan during his tenure as speaker, but officials in Taipei reportedly suggested that the meeting take place in the United States in a bid to avoid another crisis with the Chinese communist regime, although McCarthy has declined to rule out a subsequent trip to Taipei.
“That has nothing to do with my travel, if I would go to Taiwan,” he said last month. “China can’t tell me where and when I can go.”
Chinese officials reportedly have taken steps to modulate their own response. Chinese military officials announced live-fire drills in the East China Sea, but they “did not say when or where the exercises took place but footage and photos posted online show the warships conducting live-fire drills against “enemy warships,” as the South China Morning Post observed. And Chinese officials likewise have made unofficial proposals to arrange a high-level visit by a U.S. official — perhaps Vice President Kamala Harris — in order to enable Beijing to argue that it hosted a higher-ranking official than Taiwan.
“This was very coordinated messaging,” Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told the South China Morning Post, which reported on the Chinese proposal. “It’s actually a more constructive reaction than their reaction to Pelosi, puts the ball a little more in their court.”
Still, Chinese analysts and state media have maintained that “the U.S. has learned some lessons from the consequences of the provocative visit made by Nancy Pelosi last year” and thus has taken a more deferential posture with respect to this meeting.
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“But her trip is not finished yet, so we still need to pay attention to what happens in the coming days. The reaction from the Chinese mainland depends on how provocative Tsai’s activities are,” Global Times, a Chinese state media outlet, quoted “a Beijing-based expert” as saying. “In other words, if there are any countermeasures, they might be seen after Tsai completely finishes her activities in the U.S.”
Kirby maintained that any retaliation would be inappropriate and unjustified. “I’m not going to get ahead of where we are right now and speculate about what the Chinese might or might not do,” he said. “We strongly urge them to not overreact to this again because there’s just simply no reason to.”
