US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy greets Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen
Simi Valley, United States:
US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met with Taiwan’s president in California on Wednesday for talks that have already drawn outrage and stern warnings from China.
The Republican leader warmly shook hands with Tsai Ing-wen after a two-nation trip to Latin America to visit Taiwan’s few remaining official diplomatic allies was technically a stopover.
Tsai’s arrival saw dueling demonstrations from both the pro-Beijing and pro-Taipei camps at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley.
Beijing claims Taiwan as its territory and shuns any official contact with other countries from Taipei.
This week, it warned McCarthy, the California native who is second in the running for the US presidency, that he was “playing with fire” by meeting Tsai.
A State Department spokeswoman said, “China strongly opposes the US allowing Tsai Ing-wen to pass through its territory, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy strongly condemns the meeting between the third-ranking US official and Tsai Ing-wen.” opposes.” Mao Ning told reporters.
“It seriously violates the one-China principle and the three Sino-US joint communiques, and seriously undermines China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Taiwan, a thriving democracy, has been self-governing for decades. It has its own army, an independent judiciary and all the trappings of a fully functioning state.
But only a few countries accept it as a sovereign nation.
The United States formally recognizes Beijing, but is an important supporter of Taiwan, and maintains strong informal ties.
Taipei enjoys bipartisan support in the US Congress, and under Tsai’s leadership has grown closer to Washington – much to China’s annoyance.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken downplayed the significance of Tsai’s stop in California and cautioned Beijing against using it as a “pretext to escalate tensions”.
“These transits by high-level Taiwanese officials are nothing new,” he told reporters in Brussels, where he was meeting with NATO foreign ministers.
“They’re private and informal.”
‘Resolve to defend yourself’
Last year, McCarthy’s predecessor, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, sparked fury in Beijing by becoming the most senior US politician to visit the island in two decades.
This prompted Beijing to launch its largest ever military exercise in the waters around Taiwan.
McCarthy had originally planned to go by himself, but instead opted to meet Tsai in California.
The decision was seen as a compromise that would underscore support for Taiwan but avoid stoking tensions with China.
His office said the meeting would be “bipartisan”, while US media reported that more than a dozen other members of Congress would attend.
Tsai’s stop in Southern California follows visits to Guatemala and Belize and a brief stop in New York last week, where she was greeted by flag-waving Taiwanese expatriates.
“We have demonstrated the will and determination to defend ourselves, that we are able to manage risks with calm and restraint, and that we have the capacity to maintain regional peace and stability,” he said in New York.
Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund, said China has been vocal about the visit in recent days, and may find it has to keep up the rhetoric.
“China has already said some pretty threatening things which tells me they will have to respond in some way,” he told AFP, “otherwise (President) Xi Jinping could look weak.”
But China’s response will be shaped in part, Glaser said, by what McCarthy says publicly after the meeting.
China’s consulate in Los Angeles said on Monday that the meeting would “greatly hurt the national sentiments of the 1.4 billion Chinese people” and undermine the “political foundation of China-US relations”.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and was auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)