House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in California on Wednesday, marking the highest level meeting between US and Taiwanese officials since the previous House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taipei in August 2022.
The meeting is historic and risks provoking a major Chinese response as it makes McCarthy the highest-level US official to host a Taiwanese leader on US soil since Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979 to open up with Beijing.
China has warned strongly against the plans and launched a naval patrol in the Taiwan Strait ahead of the meeting. At this point, it’s not clear how far China’s military response will go. When Pelosi made the trip to Taiwan, Beijing launched its largest-ever military exercises around Taiwan, which included a simulated blockade and the firing of missiles over the island.
According to The South China Morning Post, the McCarthy-Tsai meeting at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley was attended by a bipartisan group of 15 other members of Congress. Ahead of the meeting, China’s embassy in the US was contacting US lawmakers to express its “deep concern and firm opposition” to the gathering.
Li Xiang, a representative from the Chinese embassy, said in an email that China will not “sit idly by in the face of a blatant provocation and will most likely take necessary and resolute actions in response.”
Tsai stopped in California on her way back from a visit to Central America, and the White House has downplayed her visit since Taiwanese leaders have made similar trips in the past. But the talks with McCarthy is only the third time since 1979 that a Taiwanese president met with a US House speaker.
Doesn’t count if she meets with a complete nincompoop.
That’s what I don’t get. China is supposed to be smart. You think they’d be falling all over themselves laughing so hard while telling the US, “Never mind”.
Maybe the Chinese don’t want to lose the propaganda war, they want to make sure the American people know what their government is up to, not that the MSM would inform the people.
But imagine the blow to the propaganda machine if China laughed it off as just a visit with a buffoonish clown.
Amusing is the contradiction Stoltenberg made by threatening China, while Macron and von der Leyen are in Beijing after the Chinese put Scholz in his place and Blinken lecturing the Chinese was embarrassed, now it is Macron’s and von der Leyen’s turn to experience humiliation. They are such ignorant but arrogant people. They don’t even know NATO is not a Pacific alliance, no matter what Biden and his neocons think it is.
NATO = North American terrorist organization
That’s kind of true as most of the time we never saw the other side’s respond, just like how we never knew Afghanistan was being invaded by USA militarily even before 9/11
Any nation establishing relations with China is based on them recognizing that Taiwan is a part of China and not having official relations with Taiwan as a bedrock principle, the US included starting with Nixon and reiterated by every administration since. Why on earth are we reneging on such a basic promise? There is already enormous flexibility in “unofficial” relations. The red lines doesn’t really get any redder. We push push push on the foundation of the US-China relations and it finally breaks.. Then what? Shortages in everything and massive inflation? Send millions of Chinese Americans to concentration camps like we did with Japanese Americans? And worst of all a catastrophic nuclear war?
There is no good reasons to poke the China bear any further. Taiwan has presidential elections in 9 months. Let them decide their fate without interference. I pray that the people vote for peace.
Biden and Company have gone ’round the Bend. We have no foreign policy other than to pick fights and incite violence which is, after all, “as American as apple pie”.
Biden and Company have gone ’round the Bend. We have no foreign policy other than to pick fights and incite violence which is, after all, “as American as apple pie”.
How much you wanna bet if those presidential election in Taiwan is going to be exactly like the one in the USA where there will never be a candidate for peace cause they are all bought up by US weapons manufacturers
Sounds about right. It’s all about MONEY, isn’t it? Marx was right about the cause, just wrong about solutions.
We do have a government of criminals, they are dead set to go to war against China. Why, when did China threaten the USA?
Most of the worlds population hates the Americans, and then the Americans wonder why, since they are such nice people.
It is the American public naivety which is mindboggling, they truly don’t understand why people in Iranians demonstrate and call for “death to America”, they think the Iranians are ungrateful people, Americans never did anything to them.
Most of American still think the world loves them when in reality their world is only 18% of world population while the rest of the world hates Americans.
Well said, brother.
I remember things. You all missed the big story, China won! Please do an article about this:
The Financial Times reported on Monday that U.S. Speaker of the House
Kevin McCarthy will no longer be visiting Taipei to meet with senior
government officials including Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, and
would instead be meeting with Tsai in California.
The report stated that Tsai persuaded McCarthy to make this change so
as to avoid provoking China – which might respond to a McCarthy trip
with military drills around Taiwan, as it did following then-Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in August 2022.
https://thediplomat.com/2023/03/did-taiwan-call-off-another-us-house-speaker-visit/
Are computer chips that important?
Taiwan’s “pro-China” party The Chinese Nationalist party did get 38% of the vote in 2020 so it’s not exactly a cut and dried situation over there within their public.
Who knows how much that has grown in almost 3 years?
Especially since the alternative is becoming a US satrapy.
That does not give the US license to meddle in China’s affairs.
Suspicious people could think the CIA is getting ready to help matters along, some demonstrations are easy to organize with a little money.
The US will stop meddling once China stops their own “meddling”….lol.
Do you really believe the normal course of history will ever stop?
Tribalism will never end.
The leaders in both countries need each other to provide a reason for about everything each of them do.
I’m confident Xi is smart enough to not see this as a reason to stockpile a whole mess of hypersonic strategic nuclear missiles and aim them at us. The Democrats would not dream of provoking war with two countries who possess the knowledge and the means to do so at the same time… (Sarcasm alert)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yFaZti8CZ-E
The Chinese should just shot down the plane that tsai returns in, it’s one way to quell any sort of separatist movement on their territory.
“In the dark depths of the Pacific, US submarines patrol with an eye fixed firmly on China. Rear Adm. Jeff Jablon is clear-eyed about the two biggest challenges his team faces. In today’s world, we are facing two nuclear peer adversaries where we’ve never had that before,” he explains on board the USS Mississippi, a nuclear-powered, fast-attack submarine belonging to the US Pacific Fleet. “The Soviet Union – and now Russia – was our peer adversary with respect to nuclear capability. We’re now facing China, which has expanded and modernized their nuclear capabilities.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-the-dark-depths-of-the-pacific-us-submarines-patrol-with-an-eye-fixed-firmly-on-china/ar-AA19wWei
WASH. WAR MONGERING IS REACHING A FEVERED PITCH, ISN’T IT?