Diplomatic pressure on Taiwan has ramped up recently, with Beijing poaching Taipei’s dwindling number of diplomatic allies while sending military fighter jets flying toward the island on a near-daily basis. Earlier this month, Honduras established diplomatic relations with China, leaving Taiwan with only 13 countries that recognize it as a sovereign state.
As she left Taiwan on Wednesday afternoon, Tsai framed her 10-day tour of the Americas as a chance to show Taiwan’s commitment to democratic values on the world stage.
“I want to tell the whole world democratic Taiwan will resolutely safeguard the values of freedom and democracy, and will continue to be a force for good in the world, continuing a cycle of goodness, strengthening the resilience of democracy in the world,” she told reporters before she boarded the plane. “External pressure will not obstruct our resolution to engage with the world.”
Tsai is scheduled to transit through New York on Thursday before heading to Guatemala and Belize. On April 5, she’s expected to stop in Los Angeles on her way back to Taiwan, at which time the meeting with McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) is tentatively scheduled.
The U.S. stops are the most closely watched of her trip.
Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, denounced Tsai’s U.S. stopover on her way to visiting diplomatic allies in Central America and demanded that no U.S. officials meet with her.
“We firmly oppose this and will take resolute countermeasures,” Zhu said at a news conference Wednesday. The U.S. should “refrain from arranging Tsai Ing-wen’s transit visits and even contact with American officials, and take concrete actions to fulfill its solemn commitment not to support Taiwan independence.”
Senior U.S. officials in Washington and Beijing have underscored to their Chinese counterparts that transits through the U.S. during broader international travel by Taiwan’s president have been routine for years.
On such unofficial visits in recent years, Tsai has met with members of Congress and the Taiwanese diaspora and has been welcomed by the chairperson of the American Institute in Taiwan, the U.S. government-run nonprofit that carries out unofficial U.S. relations with Taiwan.
Tsai transited through the U.S. six times between 2016 and 2019 before slowing international travel because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In reaction to those visits, China lashed out rhetorically against the U.S. and Taiwan.
However, the planned meeting with McCarthy has triggered fears of a heavy-handed Chinese reaction amid heightened frictions between Beijing and Washington over U.S. support for Taiwan, trade and human rights issues.
Following a visit by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August, Beijing launched missiles over the area, deployed warships across the median line of the Taiwan Strait and carried out military exercises in a simulated blockade of the self-governed island. Beijing also suspended climate talks with the U.S. and restricted military-to-military communication with the Pentagon.
McCarthy has said he would meet with Tsai when she is in the U.S. and has not ruled out the possibility of traveling to Taiwan in a show of support.
Beijing sees official U.S. contact with Taiwan as encouragement to make the island’s de facto independence permanent, a step that U.S. leaders say they don’t support. Pelosi (D-San Francisco) was the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to visit the island since then-Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1997. Under Washington’s official “one China” policy, the U.S. acknowledges Beijing’s view that it has sovereignty over Taiwan but considers Taiwan’s status as unsettled. Taipei is an important partner for Washington in the Indo-Pacific.
U.S. officials are increasingly worried about China attempting to make good on its long-stated goal of bringing Taiwan under its control by force. The sides split amid civil war in 1949, and Beijing sees U.S. politicians as conspiring with Tsai’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party to make the separation permanent and stymie China’s rise as a global power.
The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which has governed U.S. relations with the island, does not require Washington to step in militarily if China invades but makes it American policy to ensure Taiwan has the resources to defend itself and to prevent any unilateral change of status by Beijing.
Tensions escalated this year when President Biden ordered a suspected Chinese spy balloon shot down after it traversed the continental United States. The Biden administration has also said U.S. intelligence findings show that China is considering sending arms to Russia for its ongoing war in Ukraine, but has no evidence Beijing has done so yet.
China, however, has provided Russia with an economic lifeline and political support, and Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in Moscow this month. That was the first face-to-face meeting between the allies since the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago.
The Biden administration postponed a planned visit to Beijing by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken following the balloon controversy but has signaled that it would like to get such a visit back on track.