Taiwan has rejected Chinese threats over a planned meeting on Wednesday between President Tsai Ing-wen and US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, abandoning its restrained approach to launch a rhetorical broadside that compared China to the cold war-era Soviet Union.
“Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid,” said Chang Tun-han, deputy secretary-general of Taiwan’s presidential office, quoting from a 1983 speech by the late US president Ronald Reagan.
“It is the right of the 23mn people of Taiwan to have exchanges with democratic nations, and there is no room for China to comment,” Chang told reporters during Tsai’s trip to Belize, one of Taiwan’s 13 remaining diplomatic allies.
The blunt statement came after China’s foreign ministry warned it would “take resolute steps to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity”. Beijing claims sovereignty over Taiwan and has repeatedly threatened to attack the island if Taipei refuses to submit to its control.
McCarthy’s office on Monday confirmed that the meeting, first reported by the Financial Times last month, will take place on Wednesday at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley in California.
Tsai and her delegation looked forward to meeting with McCarthy “and a bipartisan group of lawmakers”, Chang said.
The meeting will mark the high point of a 10-day trip during which Tsai hopes to affirm Taiwan’s ability to engage in foreign relations and strengthen US support in the face of growing tensions with Beijing.
China is expected to react with another round of military manoeuvres. Following Tsai’s departure from Taipei last week, the Chinese government warned that it would view a meeting with McCarthy as “another provocation” that would “sabotage peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait” and pledged to “resolutely hit back”.
A fierce Chinese military reaction would undo Tsai’s efforts to de-escalate tensions across the Strait. McCarthy last year pledged to fly to Taiwan, following a visit by his predecessor Nancy Pelosi in August, who at the time became the first US House Speaker to make the trip in 25 years.
Beijing punished Taipei for hosting Pelosi by staging unprecedented week-long military manoeuvres, simulating a blockade of the country and firing missiles over its airspace, some of which landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone.
Since those drills, the People’s Liberation Army has staged air and naval exercises at a larger scale and closer to Taiwan than it had prior to Pelosi’s visit.
In an effort to avoid such a scenario, Tsai last month convinced McCarthy to hold off on a visit to Taiwan, and instead suggested meeting in the US during her previously planned overseas tour.
During Tsai’s two-day transit through New York last week on her way to central American diplomatic allies Guatemala and Belize, the PLA flew 10 sorties across the unofficial Taiwan Strait median line, which both sides had largely respected for decades but Beijing claimed to have “obliterated” in last year’s manoeuvres.
While the PLA conducts incursions into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone on an almost daily basis, it reserves median-line crossings for occasions when China wants to convey its strong dissatisfaction with Taiwan or other countries’ interactions with it.
Tsai is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles on Tuesday night and return to Taiwan on Thursday.
