Blinken Tells Wang at UN That Maintaining Peace Across Taiwan Strait ‘Absolutely, Vitally Important’

Amid the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his counterpart, Chinese Foreign Minister and State Councilor Wang Yi, met to discuss the tense situation surrounding Taiwan over the last two months.

According to a Friday readout by the US State Department, Blinken and Wang “discussed the need to maintain open lines of communication and responsibly manage the US-PRC [People’s Republic of China] relationship, especially during times of tension.”

"For our part, the Secretary made crystal clear, that in accordance with our long-standing one-China policy, which again has not changed, the maintenance of peace and stability across the Strait is absolutely, vitally important," a senior US official told reporters following the meeting.

Tensions surrounding Taiwan have been building for years, ever since 2017, when Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen came to power and then-US President Donald Trump rushed to support her pro-independence agenda. There has been a sharp increase in weapons sales to Taiwan, as well as US rhetoric about alleged Chinese “aggression” and the need to defend Taiwanese “democracy” against Chinese “authoritarianism.”

However, they reached an acme last month when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) traveled to Taiwan to meet with Tsai and other Taiwanese leaders and to denounce China. The third-most powerful US politician, no one of Pelosi’s stature has visited the island since 1997.

China has long warned the US about encouraging “separatist” forces on Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a Chinese province in rebellion and says is destined to reunite with the mainland. Following Pelosi’s visit, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched unprecedented drills in the areas surrounding Taiwan as a demonstration that it could blockade Taiwan if it so wished. However, the warning has not abated US behavior.

A day before his meeting with Blinken, Wang said at a New York event hosted by the Asia Society that Taiwan was the issue with the most potential to destroy US-China relations.

"Should it be mishandled, it is most likely to devastate our bilateral ties," he said. “Just as the US will not allow Hawaii to be stripped away, China has the right to uphold the unification of the country,”

“If the US handles Sino-US relations along a zero-sum game mentality and continues to use ‘political correctness’ to mislead its China policy, it will not only fail to solve its own problems, but will also bring Sino-US relations to conflict and confrontation,” Wang explained.

“The US has been making endless provocations on China’s core interests and development rights, but at the same time it is calling for stabilizing relations and avoiding confrontation. This is contradictory in logic and reality.”

The US established relations with China in 1979, switching its recognition of the legitimate Chinese government over to Beijing from the republican rump state on Taiwan, which is the last vestige of the government overthrown 30 years earlier by communist forces. Washington ended its formal relations with Taipei and acknowledged Beijing’s One-China Policy, but has maintained informal relations with Taiwan nonetheless.

Although it is no longer obliged to militarily defend Taiwan, the US has made a point of not explicitly saying whether it would or would not defend the island from Chinese attack. Despite this, US President Joe Biden has repeatedly stated that he was required to defend Taiwan, requiring his staff to contradict their boss.

“I think we can all be pretty certain at this point that it was not a gaffe - four times in a row … [means] what’s happening is there are people in the administration who think that by demonstrating a greater willingness to defend Taiwan, that’ll help reestablish deterrence,” Oriana Skylar Mastro, center fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, told Politico on Monday.