A meeting between Representative to the US Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) and a senior US Department of State official on Wednesday and its public announcement could be indicative of continuing high-level contacts with Taiwan under US President Joe Biden’s administration.
A photo of the meeting between Hsiao and Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Acting Assistant Secretary Sung Kim was posted on Twitter by the bureau.
“The US is deepening ties with Taiwan, a leading democracy and important economic and security partner,” the bureau wrote on Twitter.
It was the first formal meeting between a Taiwanese and a US official that was publicly announced under the Biden administration.
Former US president Donald Trump presided over a very public campaign to have more open diplomatic contacts with Taiwan, despite the lack of formal ties between the two sides, but it has been unclear whether the Biden government was willing to maintain the same level of engagement.
Although neither side confirmed where the meeting was held, the background of the photo indicated it took place at the State Department, and Hsiao, in response to a question on a Line group, hinted that was the case, saying the “photo speaks for itself.”
If so, it would be the first time that Hsiao has visited the State Department building since Biden took office on Jan. 20.
Past restrictions on US-Taiwan engagement did not allow meetings between Taiwanese representatives and State Department officials to take place at the State Department building, although the rule was relaxed under Trump.
In July last year, Hsiao’s predecessor, Stanley Kao (高碩泰), met with then-assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs David Stilwell at the State Department building.
Shortly after Hsiao assumed the post in late July, she also attended a meeting there with Stilwell, and later met there with Pamela Pryor, a senior official at the department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, on Jan. 16.
Neither side disclosed specifics of what was discussed at Wednesday’s meeting.
On her Twitter account, Hsiao said she had a good meeting with Kim and his team, and they discussed “many issues of mutual interest, reflecting our strong and broad partnership.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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