House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has refused to comment on her possible upcoming trip to Taiwan, telling reporters Thursday that she doesn’t “ever discuss [her] travel plans.”
“It’s a security issue. You never even hear me say if I’m going to London, because it is a security issue, and so I won’t be discussing that now,” she said.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden publicly urged Pelosi not to proceed with the possible trip.
“I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now, but I don’t know what the status of it is,” Biden said, speaking to reporters on Wednesday. The president added that he plans to speak to his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, “within the next ten days.”
On Tuesday, on the heels of a Financial Times report that Pelosi would visit Taiwan in August as part of a regional tour, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian warned Washington of the consequences of such a trip. Beijing, he said, would take “resolute and forceful measures” if the senior official, who is third in line for succession to the US presidency if something were to happen to the president and vice president, did not cancel her reported plans.
“We urge the US side to adhere to the one-China principle and the stipulations in the three China-US joint communiques. The US must not arrange for Speaker Pelosi to visit the Taiwan region and must stop official interactions with Taiwan, stop creating factors that could lead to tensions in the Taiwan Strait,” Zhao urged.
Pelosi’s potential trip would be the first of its kind in a quarter century, with then-Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich traveling to the territory in 1997 to meet with then-Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui to encourage “stronger engagement” between Washington and Taipei. During that trip, Gingrich made remarks which President Biden would echo decades later, saying he assured Lee that “we will defend Taiwan. Period,” and that “if you can be respectful but firm, you can get a long way with China.”
Much has changed since 1997, with the People’s Republic becoming the world’s second largest economy (and largest in gross domestic product in purchasing power parity terms), and building up its missile, air, and naval might substantially.
US media predicted several scenarios for a potential Chinese response to Pelosi visiting the island, including bigger aerial incursions into Taiwan’s self-proclaimed air defense identification zone, or even into the Taiwan Strait median line between the island and the mainland, missile tests or drills near Taiwan, or even a bid to send fighter jets to accompany the congressional leader during her flight en route to the island, as recommended by Global Times former editor-in-chief Hu Xijin in an op-ed Tuesday.
“If Pelosi, a fellow Democrat with US President Joe Biden, visits Taiwan, no one will believe it is because Biden ‘cannot control her.’ People are more likely to believe that her visit is part of Washington’s tactic of ‘good cop/bad cop,” Hu wrote.
Hu suggested that a Pelosi visit to Taiwan would not only be “an escalation of US support for ‘Taiwan independence,’ but a major incident,” and urged Beijing to take “firm action…to make sure that Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is scuttled.” Otherwise, he said, “PLA warplanes could ‘accompany’ Pelosi’s plane at an appropriate distance, enter the island at the same time as she does, skim over her landing site, and then fly over the island and return to the Chinese mainland.”
While Beijing congratulated Biden on his 2020 victory and expressed hopes that the Democrat would restore "healthy and stable” relations and “win-win” cooperation between the world’s economic giants after Donald Trump’s trade wars, it soon found Biden to be almost as troublesome as his predecessor, and in some ways more so, with the Taiwan question playing a central role.
Over the past year-and-a-half, Biden has repeatedly ratcheted up tensions with Beijing by pledging to “defend” Taiwan from a Chinese “invasion,” forcing the White House to enter damage control mode to assure China that the long-held US policy of strategic ambiguity remains unchanged.
In Taipei, the governing Democratic Progressive Party has taken advantage of the Biden administration’s soft touch approach to try to forge new links with the United States, both bilaterally and at international venues such as the “Democracy Summit” hosted by Biden late last year.
Last month, Beijing reiterated its demands that the US “stop all forms of official interaction with Taiwan, stop negotiating agreements with implications of sovereignty and of official nature, and refrain from sending any wrong signal to the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces.”