President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) recent trip to the US and Central America was a success for the country. It became headline news because the repressive Chinese Communist Party regime in Beijing voiced major objections, in particular against a meeting with US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
The US Department of State attempted to cool the temperature by imploring Beijing not to overreact to Tsai’s transits or the McCarthy meeting. US Deputy Secretary of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Dan Kritenbrink even held a special news conference for the foreign press on March 30.
In New York, Tsai started her trip with a banquet with about 700 members the Taiwanese-American community, also attended by the newly appoint chairwoman of the American Institute in Taiwan, Laura Rosenberger, who until recently served as China director at the US National Security Council.
In an evening closed-door ceremony on March 31 attended by about 300 invitees, the Washington-based Hudson Institute presented Tsai with its Global Leadership Award. Previous recipients of the award are inter alia former US president Ronald Reagan, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley.
Tsai also found time to socialize with young Taiwanese Americans and visit a couple of Taiwanese-run shops in Brooklyn, where she tasted the Taiwanese delicacies offered by the young Taiwanese entrepreneurs.
From New York she and her entourage flew to Guatemala, where she met with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, discussing strengthening Taiwan’s relations with its remaining allies in Central America, after Honduras broke relations with Taiwan just before the trip started.
During the three-day visit, she and her Guatemalan hosts toured the archeological site of Tikal, one of the most important urban centers of the Mayan civilization, and a hospital in Chimaltengo, built with a donation from Taiwan.
From there, she flew for a one-day visit to the capital of neighboring Belize, Belmopan, and met with the country’s prime minister, Johnny Briceno, who reaffirmed his nation’s diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
Like in Guatemala, in Belize Taiwan has been supporting agricultural programs and helps to build medical facilities for the impoverished countryside. The two Central American nations represent a significant share of Taiwan’s 13 remaining formal diplomatic allies in the world, a number that has been further reduced as China has put pressure on the allies and conducted “dollar diplomacy” to isolate Taiwan.
From Belize it was back to the US, where on the morning of Wednesday last week, Tsai was met at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California’s Simi Valley by McCarthy, who led a bipartisan delegation of 18 members of the US House.
This was the meeting that China had protested so vociferously against, but Tsai and McCarthy did not let themselves be intimidated.
They held a closed-door meeting in the morning, discussing a range of issues, and after lunch made statements to the press, with Tsai expressing gratitude for the bipartisan backing of Taiwan, which she said reassures the people of the nation “that we are not isolated and we are not alone.”
On Thursday last week, Tsai left the US and arrived back in Taiwan the next day, just in time to welcome yet another delegation from the US Congress led by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul.
For Tsai this trip represented in a sense the culmination of seven years of hard work to strengthen relations with the US. It came amid rising tension between the US and China over a range of issues. It was important for her to go through with the plans — in particular the meeting with McCarthy — and not let the repressive regime in Beijing block the contacts, with the US Congress in particular.
Outside observers wondered if the Chinese reactions would reach the same shrill and hysterical level as in August last year, when right after then-US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan it held large-scale military exercises and fired missiles over Taiwan.
It is expected that the Beijing authorities will ratchet up the pressure in the coming weeks. This started on Saturday last week, when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army sent 71 fighter aircraft in Taiwan’s direction, 45 of which entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone and crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait.
However, any overreaction by Beijing would have serious consequences in terms of a response from the US — which is very focused on Taiwan’s safety and security — as well as in Europe, where leaders first and foremost want to bring peace to Ukraine, and will be highly critical of any moves by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that distract from that goal and have the opposite effect by igniting another conflict halfway around the world.
Gerrit van der Wees is a former Dutch diplomat who teaches the history of Taiwan at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
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