Taiwan is a hot-button issue for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which claims the island nation as its territory, although it has never ruled it.
Taiwan President Lai Ching-te thanked several high-ranking U.S. lawmakers on Dec. 5 after speaking with them in Guam, thereby crossing one of the “red lines” set by the Chinese communist regime for the United States.
Lai said he was pleased to talk with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Hawaii and connect with the current House Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) on security and economic cooperation. Lai had video and phone calls with the former and current lawmakers, according to Taiwanese media.
“Taiwan is grateful for the bipartisan [U.S.] Congressional support as we advance peace & prosperity in the Indo–Pacific,” he wrote on social media platform X.
Taiwan is a hot-button issue for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which claims the island nation as its territory, although it has never ruled it.
Beijing condemned Lai’s visit, and a CCP spokesperson said the Taiwan issue was the “first red line that may not be crossed in Sino–U.S. relations,” warning that the regime would take “resolute and forceful measures.”
In his last in-person meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden, CCP leader Xi Jinping warned that four topics were off-limits for the United States, including Taiwan and human rights. The Chinese regime has a long history of human rights abuses and routinely warns international bodies against highlighting these violations.
The CCP has made silence on these issues a prerequisite for negotiations, which Xi implied again in his recent meeting.
In 2022, after Pelosi made an official visit to Taiwan as the first House speaker to do so since 1997, Beijing abruptly cut off cooperation on key issues, including agreements to help curb illicit fentanyl moving from China via Mexico to the United States. It would be more than a year before the CCP would continue the agreement, and only after drawing concessions from the United States in the form of removing sanctions against a state-run research institute.
The Chinese regime went on the offensive in the Taiwan Strait as well, holding war games, including live-fire military drills around the island that created a de facto blockade of international travel and shipping lanes.
In recent years, the sentiment toward China in Washington has shifted as evidence of large-scale, CCP-backed cyberattacks, espionage, transnational repression, and trade secret theft against the United States have been made public by law enforcement and the intelligence community.
In September, during “China Week,” lawmakers voted on several bills related to protecting the nation from CCP threats, with notable bipartisan support.
The United States also approved a $2 billion arms sale package to Taiwan in October, which included advanced surface-to-air missiles for the first time.
“This proposed sale serves U.S. national, economic, and security interests by supporting the recipient’s continuing efforts to modernize its armed forces and to maintain a credible defensive capability,” the Defense Security Cooperation Agency stated.