Taiwan’s President Tsai arrives in Los Angeles ahead of meeting with US House Speaker McCarthy

TAIPEI – Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen arrived in Los Angeles ahead of her meeting with

United States House Speaker Kevin McCarthy

on Wednesday in California, which

China has said should not take place.

China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, has

threatened a response

if the meeting happens.

After then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei in August 2022,

China staged war games around Taiwan.

Ms Tsai met senior Taiwanese security officials on Tuesday to discuss the “regional situation” ahead of her meeting in the US.

Taiwan’s presidential office said Ms Tsai held the videoconference from Belize, her last stop on a Central American trip before going to the US. She arrived in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening and is due to return to Taipei on Friday.

Ms Tsai “listened to a briefing on the overall regional situation”, her office said in a statement.

“The President asked relevant units to continue to grasp the surrounding situation, and to enable the visiting delegation to continue to grasp the situation in real time,” it added, referring to keeping Ms Tsai and her team updated while they are overseas.

Ms Tsai “expressed her gratitude” to colleagues who are sticking to their posts to ensure national security during a long holiday weekend this week, the office said.

Officials on the call included National Security Council secretary-general Wellington Koo and Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, who are with the President, as well as National Security Bureau director-general Tsai Ming-yen, who has remained in Taipei, the statement added.

Taiwan’s Defence Ministry said on Wednesday a Chinese aircraft carrier group was in the waters off the island’s south-east coast.

It said the Chinese ships, which were led by the carrier Shandong, passed through the Bashi Channel, which separates Taiwan from the Philippines, and then into waters to Taiwan’s south-east.

The ministry provided two pictures – one a grainy, black-and-white image of the carrier taken from the air, and the other of a Taiwanese sailor looking at the Shandong and another unidentified ship in the distance.

Beijing had warned Mr McCarthy, a Republican and California native who is second in line to the US presidency, that he was “playing with fire” by meeting Ms Tsai.

“China is strongly opposed to the US arranging for Tsai Ing-wen to transit through its territory, and is strongly opposed to the meeting between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the third-ranking US official, and Tsai Ing-wen,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning told reporters.

“It seriously violates the ‘one China’ principle and the three China-US joint communiques, and seriously undermines China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” she said.

Mr McCarthy had originally planned to go to Taiwan himself, but has opted instead to meet Ms Tsai at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.

His office said the meeting would be “bipartisan” and include politicians from the Democratic Party, while US media reported that more than a dozen other members of Congress would attend.

Ms Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific programme at the German Marshall Fund, said that China had been quite outspoken about the visit in recent days, and may feel that it has to keep up the rhetoric.

“China has already said some fairly threatening things which suggests to me that they have to respond in some way,” she told AFP, adding that “otherwise (President) Xi Jinping could end up looking weak”.

But China’s response will be shaped in part, she said, by what Mr McCarthy says publicly after the meeting. REUTERS, AFP