US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced Monday that he would meet with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen this week.
The event, which will take place in California on Wednesday, will be the highest-level meeting with a Taiwanese president ever to take place on US soil in recent decades, moving the United States closer to establishing formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
The meeting will be the latest move in the United States’ repudiation of the “one-China” policy, which has been in place since the summit between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong in 1972.
A joint communiqué published by the two sides in 1972 declared that “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position.”
The Trump administration initiated a systematic effort to end the one-China policy and establish formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, all the while claiming that it was responding to Chinese “aggression.” This policy has been further intensified under the Biden administration.
On Friday, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker reported that Representative Mike Gallagher also intends to meet with Tsai as part of a delegation of 10 members of the “House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.”
Last month, Gallagher proclaimed in opening remarks to the committee’s first hearing that US “strategic competition” with China “is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century.”
Gallagher outlined a two-year “blueprint” for “selective economic decoupling from China.”
While it is in California, the House delegation will meet with military officers, including former US Defense Secretary James Mattis, and top executives at Disney, Apple, Alphabet, Palantir and Microsoft, according to Axios.
Axios cited a committee aide who said, “This can’t all be defensive… We also need to be thinking about offensive and how do we out-compete.”
The Taiwanese president’s visit to Los Angeles will take place on her way back to Taiwan following a three-day visit to Belize. During her first stopover in the US on the way to Latin America, she reportedly met with Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in New York.
On Monday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry declared that China is opposed to “any form of official interaction and contact between the US side and Taiwan authorities.”
Last August, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, prompting a series of Chinese live-fire military exercises around the island as the US sent its warships into nearby waters.
At the end of 2022, China abandoned its Zero-COVID policy at the behest of major transnational corporations, which saw it as an impediment to profit-making. The move created a medical catastrophe, leading to the deaths of 1.3 million people, according to estimates from the health analytics company Airfinity.
On February 4, the US Air Force attacked and destroyed an unmanned and non-maneuverable Chinese balloon that had blown over the United States, marking the first time any aircraft has been acknowledged to have been shot down in US airspace.
On February 23, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States plans to quadruple the number of US troops stationed on Taiwan, from 30 to between 100 and 200. The Journal noted, “Beyond training on Taiwan, the Michigan National Guard is also training a contingent of the Taiwanese military, including during annual exercises with multiple countries at Camp Grayling in northern Michigan, according to people familiar with the training.”
This was followed a week later by Gallagher’s declaration of an “existential struggle” with China, against the backdrop of a systematic campaign by the media and intelligence agencies to promote the discredited Wuhan lab lie. On February 28, FBI Director Christopher Wray falsely declared “the origins of the [COVID-19] pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
On March 11, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines confirmed that US President Joe Biden was stating the official position of the US government last year when he pledged to send US troops to war against China if it invaded Taiwan—effectively marking the end of the policy of “strategic ambiguity.”
On March 24, the US House of Representatives passed the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, which formally tasks the State Department to “identify opportunities to lift any remaining self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement and articulate a plan to do so,” setting into motion the formal ending of the one-China policy.
These moves to fundamentally alter the US-China relationship have been accompanied by unhinged and racist rants on the part of members of Congress. On March 24, Cathy McMorris, chair of the US House Energy and Commerce Committee, declared that “the Chinese Communist Party” is seeking to “spy on you, manipulate what you see, and exploit your future generation” through TikTok.
In an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick declared, “I don’t think good people escape the CCP in China… These people are mostly educated young adults, that China is sending here to eventually go in our colleges, work at our business, steal secrets, send them back to China.”
The systematic moves to alter decades of diplomatic precedent in US-China relations are not an accident. They are part of a campaign to provoke a military conflict with China in what the Biden administration’s national security strategy calls the “decisive decade” for the US to “win the competition for the 21st century.”
In congressional testimony last week, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley declared that historians would look back at this century and ask, “What was the relationship between the United States and China? Did it end up in a war or not?”
Miley explained that unless the United States takes action against China, it will economically eclipse the United States. As he put it, “What we see in China… the greatest growth and wealth of any country... This is an enormous growth in wealth and an enormous shift in power globally… It is incumbent upon us to make sure that we remain number one at all times.”