China ‘Resolutely Opposes’ Now-Canceled Trip by US House Speaker Pelosi to Taiwan, FM Says

Ahead of an Asia trip by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rumored to include a stop off in Taiwan, China has lodged strong objections. However, later on Thursday, the senior lawmaker tested positive for COVID-19, and her trip was postponed.

Japan’s Fuji News Network reported on Thursday, citing “people familiar with the matter,” that Pelosi would visit Taiwan on Friday prior to arriving in Japan for a Sunday meeting with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Pelosi’s office has not released an itinerary of her Asia trip and rejected media requests for it on security grounds.

However, the 82-year-old senior lawmaker contracted COVID-19 on Thursday, and while her office described her as asymptomatic, she will be quarantined for five days. Her office said that the trip would now be “postponed to a later date.”

If she did touch down on the autonomous island, she would be the first House Speaker to visit Taiwan since Newt Gingrich did so 25 years ago in the aftermath of the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis.

Beijing regards Taiwan as a Chinese province in rebellion and has repeatedly condemned Washington’s open but unofficial support for the Taiwanese government, noting the US agreed with Beijing’s position in the 1970s diplomatic negotiations underpinning the opening of relations between the two countries. Upon learning of Pelosi’s planned trip, they invoked those agreements.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian warned that “If the US insists on having its own way, China will take firm and strong measures to firmly safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity. All possible consequences that arise from this will completely be borne by the US side.”

“China resolutely opposes all forms of official contact between the US and Taiwan. Congress is a branch of the US government and should stringently abide by the one-China policy that the US upholds,” Zhao told reporters on Thursday.

“If Speaker Pelosi visits Taiwan, this would gravely violate the one-China principle and the stipulations of the three China-US Joint Communiqués, seriously undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, severely impact the political foundation of China-US relations and send an erroneous signal to ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces,” he added. “China firmly opposes this and has lodged solemn representations with the US side.”

Zhao was also asked about a comment by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen the day prior, in which she said the US was prepared to impose similar sanctions on China to those on Russia if China were to attempt to reunite Taiwan with the mainland by force.

“There is but one China in the world and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory,” Zhao said. “The Taiwan question is an issue left over from the civil war in China. The means of its resolution is China’s internal affair, where no foreign country has any right to interfere.”

The Taiwanese government is all that remains of the old republican government, which lost the civil war to communist forces in 1949. The Communist Party of China established the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, but was unable to cross the strait and conquer Taiwan. In the years since, all but a handful of nations have switched their recognition of the legitimate Chinese government from Taipei to Beijing.

Visits by top US officials to Taiwan have increased in recent years, as Washington has seen Taiwan as a key part of its “great power competition” strategy against China and Russia. Last month saw former US Secretary of State and former CIA director Mike Pompeo visit the island, as well as a second delegation of several former leading US defense officials. The US has also vastly increased its military aid to the island, most recently approving a $95 million sale of Patriot air defense systems on Wednesday.

Li Fei, a researcher at Xiamen University’s Taiwan Research Institute, told the South China Morning Post that a visit by Pelosi would be “part of Washington’s salami-slicing tactics on Taiwan in recent years – trying to force a showdown with Beijing and stir up regional conflict to maintain US global hegemony.”