US House Speaker Pelosi lands in Taiwan, defying Chinese warnings
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan on Tuesday (Aug 2) in defiance of Chinese threats, making her the highest-ranking American politician to visit the island in 25 years.
Pelosi’s military aircraft arrived at Songshan Airport at 10.43pm local time, Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported.
Pelosi will visit Taiwan’s Parliament on Wednesday morning, have lunch with President Tsai Ing-wen and also meet with democracy activists, according to local media reports.
The previously unannounced stop in Taiwan comes after Pelosi led a congressional delegation to Singapore and Malaysia. They will head next to South Korea and Japan - two staunch US allies.
Taiwan faced cyberattacks ahead of Pelosi’s arrival, with the presidential office saying it suffered a 20-minute barrage in the early evening hours. The scale of the DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service, attacks were 200 times worse than usual, presidential spokesman Xavier Chang said. The Foreign Ministry’s website also appeared to be down.
Caution washed across financial markets in the countdown to Pelosi’s visit. Equity markets in China and Hong Kong were the worst performers in Asia as security analysts outlined potential military responses from Beijing.
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China, which regards Taiwan as part of its territory, has vowed an unspecified military response to any Pelosi visit that risks sparking a crisis between the world’s biggest economies. President Xi Jinping on a call last week told President Joe Biden he would “resolutely safeguard China’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity” and that “whoever plays with fire will get burned.”
On Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying dismissed US statements that Congress was an independent branch of government, saying it should abide by the Biden administration’s foreign policy.
“When the House speaker, being the third-highest ranking figure in the US government, flies on a US military plane to make a provocative visit to the Taiwan region, it is certainly not unofficial behaviour,” she said at a briefing in Beijing, adding that any countermeasures from Beijing would be “justified” in response to such “unscrupulous behaviour.”
China would be in touch with its US ambassador “when appropriate,” she said. She left the door open for a possible in-person summit between Biden and Xi, however, saying that any such meeting would be decided “through diplomatic channels.”
While there are few signs China is planning a full-scale invasion of Taiwan, Beijing has responded to past visits by foreign officials with large sorties into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone or across the median line that divides the strait. A large number of PLA warplanes flew close to the median line Monday morning, Taiwan’s TVBS reported, adding that Taiwanese military warships were also deployed in what it called a routine operation.
Taiwan’s Defence Ministry said in a statement Tuesday that the island’s military was prepared to send “appropriate armed forces according to the threat.” “The military is determined, confident and capable of ensuring national security,” it added.
China’s reaction to Pelosi’s visit will be closely watched. A spokesman for the White House National Security Council, John Kirby, said on MSNBC Monday that Beijing shouldn’t view her trip as a provocation. He added that it’s “disconcerting that the Chinese might use this as some sort of pretext to actually increase the tensions.”
Chinese media outlets including the Communist Party’s Global Times have suggested the People’s Liberation Army would respond aggressively to a Pelosi trip, possibly by sending warplanes right over the island.
Taiwan would then need to decide whether to shoot them down, a move that could trigger a wider military conflict. China would have to weigh the possibility that America and its allies in the region would be drawn in militarily.
Biden said in May that Washington would intervene to defend Taiwan in any attack from China, although the White House later clarified he meant the US would provide weapons, in accordance with existing agreements.
Under the deal reached in 1978 to normalise relations between China and the US, Washington agreed to recognize only Beijing as the seat of China’s government, while acknowledging - but not endorsing - the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.
The US has insisted that any unification between the island and mainland must be peaceful, and supplied Taiwan with advanced weaponry while remaining deliberately ambiguous about whether US forces would help defend against a Chinese attack. BLOOMBERG
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