A group of US lawmakers held a rare publicly disclosed meeting with Taiwan’s top defense official, a discussion that risks spurring China to step up its military intimidation of the democracy.
The delegation, led by US Representative Ami Bera from California, met with Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) on Tuesday in Taipei, the Military News Agency reported yesterday.
Koo said that Taiwan is a reliable partner for the US and is committed to strengthening its defensive capabilities, the report said.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of National Defense
US President Donald Trump had suggested during his presidential campaign last year that Taipei increase its military spending.
The meeting adds to events lately that Beijing is likely to perceive as provocative. Beijing on Tuesday hit back at Taiwan for joining a years-long US campaign to curtail China’s technological ascent when it blacklisted the nation’s artificial intelligence (AI) and chipmaking champions.
Bera and the other lawmakers met President William Lai (賴清德) on Monday. While such meetings are fairly common for US lawmakers, they still annoy Beijing because it opposes nations it has ties with from having official contact with Taiwan.
China would also note that military officials from Taiwan attended exercises at a key US military base in Alaska last week. Also last week, retired military officials from Taiwan, Japan and the US reportedly attended a simulated “tabletop exercise” in Taipei.
A new round of Chinese exercises around Taiwan soon cannot be ruled out, said Lin Po-chou (林柏州), assistant research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a Taipei-based government-affiliated think tank.
“China might also escalate the scale of the existing provocation of Taiwan, or express dissatisfaction through propaganda warfare or commentary in official media outlets,” he added.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army has held an unprecedented amount of exercises around Taiwan since Lai took office a little more than a year ago. It has also flexed its naval might around Japan and Australia.
The latest developments come as China-US tensions cooled following trade talks in London last week. Taipei is also holding discussions with Washington to avoid getting hit with tariffs.
While previous US delegations are likely to have had meetings with Taiwanese defense ministers, they are not usually publicly disclosed.
A group in 2021 visited the Ministry of National Defense in Taipei and was briefed on China’s military threats. Reports at the time did not say which Taiwanese military officials the lawmakers met.
The ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment yesterday.
Jack Chen (陳彥廷), director of Formosa Defense Vision, an advocacy group, said the announcement of the meeting between Koo and the US visitors “showed that the military exchanges and cooperation between the US and Taiwan are becoming increasingly high profile and transparent, aligning with a long-term trend that began under the [former US president Joe] Biden administration and has continued into the Trump administration.”
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS