China renews threats as Taiwan president greeted by crowds in New York:
Chinese officials have warned of “serious” consequences if Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, meets the US House speaker next week, after Tsai arrived in New York to crowds of supporters and protesters.
Tsai is stopping in the US twice during her 10-day visit to Taiwan’s diplomatic allies Guatemala and Belize. Her itinerary has not been disclosed and none of the events were open to the public or media.
There are expectations Tsai will meet Kevin McCarthy in Los Angeles on her return journey. On Thursday China’s charge d’affaires in Washington, Xu Xueyan, told reporters any meeting between Tsai and McCarthy would have a “serious, serious, serious” impact on US-China relations.
Relations between the two nations have declined sharply, after a Chinese weather balloon flew into US airspace and was shot down, undoing months of work by both sides to repair relations.
In Beijing a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry (Mofa) reiterated threats made on Wednesday to “fight back” if the meeting went ahead. Mao Ning said Beijing was closely following developments and would “resolutely safeguard our sovereignty and territorial integrity”.
McCarthy had been keen to visit Taiwan, and a meeting between the two in the US has been described as an effort to avoid a repeat of last August, when McCarthy’s predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, stopped in Taipei and met Tsai. The visit angered Beijing, which staged days of intensive live-fire military drills around Taiwan’s main island in response.
On what is her first US stopover since 2019, Tsai touted Taiwan’s economic, security and diplomatic achievements in a closed-door speech on Wednesday night to overseas Taiwanese in New York, her office said in a statement on Thursday, calling the island a “beacon of democracy in Asia”.
“In particular, the relationship between Taiwan and the United States is closer than ever,” she said, noting “significant progress” in economic and security cooperation.
Tsai said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, establishing a factory in Phoenix, Arizona, demonstrated the island’s technological strength.
Though Taiwan faced “enormous challenges”, it would not be isolated, Tsai said. She also thanked the US government for implementing security agreements with Taiwan, including nine announced arms sales by Joe Biden’s administration.
On Thursday, the director general of Taiwan’s national security bureau told parliament it expected a less hostile reaction to a Tsai-McCarthy meeting on US soil.
“We believe that the actions the Chinese communists might take are unlikely to go as far as being as large as when Pelosi visited last August,” the director general, Tsai Ming-yen said, echoing comments from defence officials earlier this week, that Taiwan had detected no sign of unusual Chinese military activity or escalation.