US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went ahead with her challenge to China and landed in Taiwan for the first such visit in 25 years on Tuesday.
China vows to react militarily to the provocation, opening the most serious crisis in years between the world’s two largest economies amid global tension sparked by the Ukrainian War, in which Beijing supports Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Pelosi is on a visit to Asia, where she arrived in Singapore on Monday (1st) before heading to Malaysia. Its next two official stops are Japan and South Korea, but the detour to Taiwan has been rumored since last week.
He infuriated China, which has considered the island a rebellious province since an autonomous capitalist regime was formed there by those defeated in the revolution that led the communists to establish their dictatorship in 1949.
“In the face of the US’s irresponsible disregard for China’s repeated and serious representations, any countermeasure taken by the Chinese side will be necessary and justified,” said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying. For her, Americans “will pay” for the visit.
The Taipei Armed Forces, meanwhile, went on high alert on Tuesday. On their website, they said they were ready for any action by Beijing — a major air raid is expected to be launched to test its defences. As Pelosi’s plane landed at 10:43 pm (11:43 am GMT), reports emerged of Chinese fighter jets over the Taiwan Strait.
China sees any political gestures in favor of Taipei as supporting the island’s independence ideal. In 1997, the last time someone in Pelosi’s position was in Taiwan, in this case Republican Newt Gingrich, the Chinese had to swallow it.
The situation is different now, as China has risen to the rank of challenger power in the global arena. It does not have the military muscle of the US, with a defense budget equivalent to a quarter of that of the US, but its political and economic assertiveness has expanded under Xi Jinping, which began in 2012.
Because of this, Washington reacted with the Cold War 2.0, launched in 2017 as a tariff clash, but which quickly spread to all possible shores of friction. Taiwan is the most sensitive of all: since then, US officials have visited the island and military cooperation has continued to grow.
Pelosi’s departure made Chinese rhetoric explode. In a phone call with President Joe Biden, Xi said the US needed to respect the “one China” principle that governs bilateral recognition of countries – ambiguously, since 1979 Washington has both accepted Beijing’s sovereignty over Taiwan and supported it. military to the island, promising to defend it in case of war.
Biden, who went so far as to say he thought the trip was a bad idea, didn’t have much he could do – if he didn’t back his Democratic ally in private, as is likely, given that their party is in a bad position for the November parliamentary elections. and a show of external strength would come in handy.
In this sense, the US assassination of the leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, Ayman al-Zawahiri, fits the script. What is not foreseen is the possibility of a direct clash with the likely Chinese reaction: a war is everything that the American economy in recession would not need, given the interconnection with Chinese structures.
China promised a military reaction, and some feared action against Pelosi’s plane, a Boeing 737 modified for official transport called the C-40C, with a sophisticated communications system but lacking the military countermeasures to deflect missiles that the aircraft from Biden owns.
It could be an ostensible escort by Chinese fighter jets or, as radical nationalists wanted, the downing of the plane – which would give rise to a clash between the powers. With the conflict in Ukraine directly opposing Russia to NATO (Western military alliance) in Europe, a hypothesis of World War III would gain dramatic contours.
Indeed, since last week Moscow has been issuing statements of support for China in the struggle. Biden and other Western leaders have already warned Xi against repeating Putin and invading the island, which makes sense in the current context, although the historical realities of the Taiwanese and Ukrainian case are very different.
To begin with, worldwide recognition of Taiwan is limited to 14 of the 193 countries affiliated to the UN, which in turn considers that only the People’s Republic of China can be called China —Taipei is designated the capital of the Republic of China. At the same time, even the island is careful never to have declared independence, in the hope of avoiding war and negotiating its autonomy.
It is not known how long Pelosi will be on the island, but tension between China and the US has been at an all-time high in recent years. The Chinese gave several war messages: they closed an area of ​​the South China Sea for military training and continued with live ammunition exercises further north, in the Bohai Sea – the gulf closest to Beijing.
In coastal cities in Fujian province, which directly targets Taiwan at a distance of at least 130 km, military vehicles and tanks were seen moving, according to the South China Morning Post. They would not participate in an invasion, an air-naval operation par excellence, but they serve as a signal.
There are unconfirmed reports that the two Chinese aircraft carriers were put into action. In the South China Sea, the US deployed a group of ships led by the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan as early as last week in a freedom of navigation operation aimed at confronting Chinese claims in its main import-export corridor.
Search for Pelosi’s flight brings down website
The arrival of a deputy on the island had cinematographic touches. No one knew exactly whether she was on the plane or on a Taiwanese plane that left Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, at the same time. The trip was never officially announced.
Worldwide interest in the route took down a popular flight-tracking website, Flightradar24, which had 300,000 users trying to track Pelosi’s supposed path. With the identification signal SPAR19, the aircraft flew through the southern Philippines and turned left, climbing up the coast of the country to approach Taiwan from the Pacific.
His plane has, due to the configuration of the fuel tanks, almost twice the range of the 737-800 on which it is based, 9,300 km. There are 28 of them, in three versions, in the American fleet. It also bypassed the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, for obvious reasons.
Throughout the day, preparations were seen in Taiwan for the visit. Access to the Grand Hyatt Taipei hotel was blocked, and military personnel were seen at the capital’s airport. Pelosi is a particularly disliked figure in Beijing: in 1991, she staged a protest in Tiananmen Square against the massacre of students that had taken place two years earlier.
