This Tuesday, China warned the United States House Speaker against holding a meeting with the president of Taiwan on Wednesday.
The Chinese consulate in Los Angeles issued a statement on April 4 calling President Tsai Ing-wen’s planned meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — the third-highest-ranking figure in the U.S. government — “not conducive to regional peace, security nor stability, and is not in the common interests of the people of China and the United States.”
“Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory,” the spokesperson said. “Tsai’s visit is not so much a ’transit,’ but an attempt to seek breakthroughs and propagate ’Taiwan independence.’”
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Tsai has been in Central America and will be making a stopover in Los Angeles on April 5 on her way back to Taipei. She will deliver a public speech at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and meet with U.S. officials, including McCarthy.
McCarthy’s office confirmed this meeting on April 3, per Fox News.
Taiwan’s foreign ministry responded by calling China’s reaction to the transit “absurd,” per Reuters.
“Even if the authoritarian government continues with its expansion and intensifies coercion, Taiwan will not back down,” the statement read.
China responded with hostility the last time a bilateral talk occurred between the U.S. House Speaker and the Taiwanese government.
During Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August last year, China conducted military exercises around the island of Taiwan in an act of intimidation, as The Dallas Express previously reported.
Taiwan has not detected any abnormal Chinese actions so far, per Reuters.
Yet the country has been conducting operations in the vicinity of the island, with Taiwan’s defense ministry spotting nine Chinese military aircraft within its air defense identification zone on April 4.
“They will certainly get angry and there will be some actions, but we are actually used to this,” Sunny Lai, a 42-year-old social worker in Taipei, told Reuters.
Yet Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the Chinese state-run tabloid Global Times, posted on Twitter that there will be consequences for the meeting.
“The Chinese mainland will definitely react, and make the Tsai Ing-wen regime lose much more than what they can gain from this meeting,” Hu wrote.
The U.S. has increased its military presence in Taiwan, as previously reported by The Dallas Express. Although the exact number of troops hasn’t been formally disclosed, additional troops have been sent to the island nation as part of an expanded American-led training program to bolster Taiwan’s military capabilities.
At a time when U.S.-Chinese relations are increasingly hostile, it remains to be seen what the impact of McCarthy and Tsai’s meeting will have.
The spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, Mao Ning, spoke to reporters in Beijing on April 4 and reiterated the warning to not conduct any meeting between Tsai and U.S. political figures.
“The Chinese side will closely monitor the situation as it develops and resolutely defend our sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Mao said, per a press release.
