But last week, China’s warnings against a possible high-risk trip by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei appeared to have caused concern in Washington.
Since then, a flurry of comments from US officials has only added to the sense of alarm.
“I think what the president was saying is that maybe the military was afraid that my plane was going to be shot down or something. I don’t know exactly,” Pelosi said.
On Sunday, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also weighed in, offering to join Pelosi on her reported trip.
“Nancy, I’ll go with you. I’m banned in China, but not freedom-loving Taiwan. See you there!” Pompeo wrote on Twitter. Privately, Biden administration officials have expressed concern that China might try to declare a no-fly zone over Taiwan to derail the potential trip, a US official told CNN.
But with Pelosi’s potential visit now out in the open, any decision to delay or not go risks being seen as a concession.
“Speaker Pelosi should go to Taiwan and President Biden should make it very clear to President Xi that there is nothing the Chinese Communist Party can do about it,” Republican Sen. Ben Sasse said Monday. “No more weakness and self-talk.”
The Chinese government has not publicly specified what “forceful measures” it plans to take, but some Chinese experts say Beijing’s reaction could involve a military component.
“China will respond with unprecedented countermeasures, the strongest it has ever taken since the Taiwan Strait crisis,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University of China.
Military conflicts erupted in the Taiwan Strait in the 1950s, the decade after Communist China was founded, with Beijing bombing several outlying islands controlled by Taipei on two separate occasions.
The last major crisis occurred in 1995-1996, after Taiwan’s president at the time, Lee Teng-hui, visited the US. Enraged by the visit, China fired missiles into the waters around Taiwan, and the crisis ended only after the United States sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the area in a strong show of support for Taipei.
“If Pelosi goes ahead with her visit, the United States will surely prepare to respond militarily to a possible Chinese military response,” Shi said. “The situation between China and the US will be very tense.”
A different time, a different China
Pelosi’s reported trip would not be the first time a US House speaker has visited Taiwan. In 1997, Newt Gingrich met with Lee, the island’s first democratically elected president, in Taipei just days after his trip to Beijing and Shanghai, where Gingrich said he warned Chinese leaders that the US would intervene militarily if Taiwan was attacked. According to Gingrich, the response he received at the time was “quiet.” Publicly, China’s Foreign Ministry criticized Gingrich after his visit to Taiwan, but the response was limited to rhetoric.
Beijing has signaled that things would be different this time.
Twenty-five years later, China is stronger, more powerful and more confident, and its leader Xi Jinping has made it clear that Beijing will no longer tolerate any slights or perceived challenges to its interests.
“It’s a completely different regime in Beijing with Xi Jinping. China is in a position to be more assertive, to impose costs and consequences on countries that don’t take China’s interest into account in their policies or actions,” he said. said Drew Thompson. a visiting senior researcher at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.
“In that sense, it’s a very different China than when Newt Gingrich visited in 1997.”
On Monday, Gingrich weighed in on the conversation, writing on social media: “What is the Pentagon thinking when it publicly warns that Speaker Pelosi is going to Taiwan? If we are so intimidated by the Chinese Communists, we can’t even protect a North- American from Why should Beijing believe we can help Taiwan survive? Timidity is dangerous.”
Under Xi, a rising tide of nationalism has swept China, and support for “reunification” with Taiwan — possibly by force — is growing.
Hu Xijin, a former editor of the state-owned nationalist tabloid Global Times and a prominent hawkish voice in Chinese online pundits, has suggested that PLA warplanes should “accompany” Pelosi’s plane to Taiwan and fly over the island.
This would be a major violation of Taiwan’s autonomy. As cross-strait tensions rise to their highest level in decades, China has sent a record number of warplanes into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense identification zone, with aircraft scrambling to warn them, but so far the PLA planes have not come in. the territorial airspace of the island.
“If the Taiwanese military dares to shoot at PLA fighter jets, we will resolutely respond by shooting down Taiwanese warplanes or attacking Taiwanese military bases. If the United States and Taiwan want an all-out war, then the time has come to ‘liberate Taiwan’. Hu wrote.
While Hu’s belligerent statements toward Taiwan have long resonated in China’s nationalist circles, they do not represent Beijing’s official position (and some of Hu’s earlier threats against Taiwan have proven empty) .
But as Thompson points out, the fact that Hu’s remarks have not been censored in China’s tightly controlled media shows “some degree of support among the Communist Party,” if only for propaganda value.
Time sensitive
The visit by Pelosi, a well-known public figure and high-profile critic of Beijing, would come at a sensitive time for China.
The PLA celebrates its founding anniversary on Aug. 1 as Xi, the country’s most powerful leader in decades, prepares to break with convention and seek a third term at the ruling Communist Party’s 20th congress this fall.
While the politically sensitive moment could prompt a stronger response from Beijing, it could also mean the Communist Party wants to ensure stability and prevent things from spiraling out of control, experts say.
“Honestly, this is not a good time for Xi Jinping to start a military conflict right before the 20th Party Congress. It is in Xi Jinping’s interest to handle this rationally and not instigate a crisis on top of all the other crises he has to deal with front. with,” Thompson said, citing China’s slowing economy, deepening housing crisis, rising unemployment and the ongoing struggle to curb sporadic outbreaks under its zero- covid
“So I think whatever they do, it’s going to be measured, it’s going to be calculated. They’re certainly going to try to put more pressure on Taiwan, but I think they’re going to stop well short of anything that’s particularly risky or that might create conditions that they can’t control.” he said.
Shi, the professor at Beijing’s Renmin University, agreed that US-China tension is unlikely to escalate into full-scale military conflict.
“Unless things have accidentally gotten out of hand in a way that no one can predict, there is no possibility of a military conflict between the US and China,” he said.
But Shi said it’s hard to predict what China will do right now.
“It is a very difficult situation to deal with. First, (Beijing) must decisively adopt unprecedented countermeasures. Second, it must avoid military conflicts between the United States and China,” he said. “We won’t know how things will go until the last minute.”
CNN’s Brad Lendon and Kylie Atwood contributed to this story.