The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday rejected China’s claims that US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier this week breached “China’s sovereignty.”
On Friday, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) told a news conference that China’s territorial integrity was breached by Pelosi’s visit.
“Should Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) return to life, he would point his finger at the nose of [President] Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and call her an unfilial child,” Wang said.
Photo: Reuters
In Taipei, the ministry said in a statement that “Beijing’s absurd claims that Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan contravened Chinese sovereignty and destabilized the [Taiwan] Strait are totally false.”
“Telling another country that ‘you cannot be friends with so-and-so’ is extremely childish,” it said.
Members of the US Congress make routine visits to Taiwan as they have done for many years, the ministry said, adding that Taipei has since the beginning of the year hosted 14 House members, including Pelosi, six US government representatives and seven US senators.
Photo: AFP
“The precedent for a speaker of the House to visit Taiwan has already been established, and the exchange of visits by parliamentarians and officials is entirely normal in democracies,” it said, referring to the then-House speaker Newt Gingrich’s visit in 1997.
China’s use of Pelosi’s visit as a pretext for conducting dangerous military drills has caused regional tensions to rise, it said, calling the drills a deviation from the rules governing the conduct of civilized people.
“It is crystal clear that the ongoing crisis is of China’s making, that Beijing is to blame for taking provocative and escalatory actions” in the Strait, the ministry said.
Beijing’s live-fire missile tests off Taiwan proper, crossings of the Strait’s median line by ships and planes, and intrusions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone have shown that China is the real troublemaker in the Strait, it said.
The irresponsible firing of ballistic missiles has disrupted maritime traffic in one of the world’s most important sea routes and interfered with Japan’s exclusive economic zone, it added.
Taiwan and China are mutually non-subordinate entities, and Taiwan has never been ruled by China, the ministry said.
“China has no right to interfere in Taiwan’s efforts to make friends with any country in the world,” the ministry said.
In related news, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday announced that Beijing would “adopt sanctions on Pelosi and her immediate family members in accordance with relevant laws of China.”
Pelosi’s grandson Paul Vos was quoted by the South China Morning Post as asking: “Am I supposed to be scared? What are they going to do? Cancel my TikTok?”
“For the record, I am not even on TikTok,” he added.
As China waged extensive military exercises off Taiwan, a group of US defense experts in Washington was focused on their own simulation of an eventual — but for now entirely hypothetical — US-China war over the nation. The unofficial what-if game is being conducted on the fifth floor of an office building not far from the White House, and it posits a US military response to a Chinese invasion in 2026. Even though the participants bring a US perspective, they are finding that a US-Taiwan victory, if there is one, could come at a huge cost. “The results are showing that under
WRONG TIMING: The delegation’s trip has not only disappointed Taiwanese, but could send a wrong message to the global community, Tsai Ing-wen said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Vice Chairman Andrew Hsia (夏立言) yesterday left with a delegation for a trip to China, drawing fire for visiting at a time when Beijing has been conducting intensive military drills to pressure Taiwan. Before boarding, he told reporters that the delegation would be visiting Taiwanese communities and students in China, and possibly meet with Chinese officials. The Mainland Affairs Council on Tuesday night said that it was not the right time for political party members to visit China, as Beijing has been conducting military exercises since Thursday last week. President Tsai Ing- wen (蔡英文), chairperson of the Democratic
ORDNANCE: Under a five-year plan, the Chungshan Institute would make about 200 Hsiung Feng II and III/IIIE, and Hsiung Sheng missiles, an official said The Ministry of National Defense plans to counter the Chinese navy by producing more than 1,000 anti-ship missiles over the next five years, a defense official familiar with the matter said yesterday. The comments came after China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy began a series of military drills in a simulated naval blockade of Taiwan proper following a visit to Taipei by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Although China has in the past few years rapidly produced many warships and added them to its navy, these large vessels are more suited for warfare on the open sea than in the narrow
The organizers of WorldPride 2025 have canceled the Kaohsiung event because its licensing group, InterPride, demanded that it remove “Taiwan” from the event’s name, they said in a statement yesterday. Kaohsiung was to host WorldPride Taiwan 2025 after being granted the right by the global LGBTQ advocacy group. However, the WorldPride 2025 Taiwan Preparation Committee said that InterPride recently gave “abrupt notice” asking it to change the name of the event and use “Kaohsiung” instead of “Taiwan,” even though it applied for the event using “Taiwan” in its name. The name was initially chosen for its significance to the Taiwanese LGBTQ community, as
RSS