Taiwan leader’s trip to the US comes with luggage

Most travelers do their best to avoid long layovers.

Not Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who arrives in New York on Wednesday for two nights of what is billed as a “transit” en route to the democratic island’s few remaining allies in Central America.

Tsai won’t be using the downtime to visit the Statue of Liberty or brave a chilly walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. He won’t even watch the Yankees spring training game against the San Francisco Giants.

On the other hand, the Taiwanese president, who has passed a year of predictions about his island being invaded for China amid worsening relations between Washington and Beijing, he has some work planned.

On Thursday, her only full day in New York, Tsai will receive a leadership award from the Hudson Institute, a conservative foreign policy think tank, where she will also deliver a speech.

After leaving on Friday for Guatemala and Belize, two of the few remaining countries that maintain diplomatic relations with their autonomous island instead of Beijing, Tsai flies back to Los Angeles on Tuesday, where she will spend two more nights in transit.

There, Tsai will deliver another speech, this time at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in nearby Simi Valley, and will meet with the new Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, who has promised to lead a congressional delegation back to Taiwan later this year.

If all of that sounds a lot like an official visit to the United States by the leader of a close ally (to whom President Joe Biden has repeatedly promised full military support), make no mistake. It’s just transit.

What’s in a name?

On March 8, Matt Lee, the Associated Press diplomatic writer, asked then-State Department spokesman Ned Price explained why Tsai’s visit was still billed as “transit”, questioning the official US line that it was allowed for her “comfort and convenience”.

“It can be ‘comfy’ and it can be ‘convenient’, sort of like spending two weeks in Palm Springs on US government pennies preparing for APEC,” Lee said, referring to an annual conference. But he added: “If I was flying from the US to China and decided to stop in Los Angeles for three days, I don’t think the airline would say that’s transit.”

Price did not budge, refusing to describe Tsai’s visit as anything other than “transit” and saying it was part of the “status quo” in Taiwan, which buy billions of dollars worth of US weapons but which Beijing considers a renegade province and has pledged to “meet” with the mainland.

“The transits of the United States by high-level Taiwan officials are consistent with long-standing US policy and our strong unofficial relations with Taiwan,” Price said. “Chairperson Tsai herself has transited through the United States six times in the past seven years. There has been absolutely no change in the US ‘One China’ policy.”

“The transit of high-level officials from Taiwan is consistent” with the “One China” policy, Price explained. “It’s been done before. It’s a practice.” He added that he was “not aware” of any plans for State Department officials to meet with Tsai during her six days on US soil.

semiofficial

Dennis Wilder, a research fellow at the US-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University, told Radio Free Asia that sensitivities around Tsai’s trip were down in Washington. balancing act in Taiwan since normalized relationships with Beijing in the 1970s.

That change in diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, brokered by President Richard Nixon since the late 1960s but formalized by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, has required the US to deny that Taiwan is independent of Beijing, even if he serves as patron of the island.

Wilder, who served as the CIA’s deputy deputy director for East Asia and the Pacific and before that as the White House National Security Council director for East Asia under President George W. Bush, said the use of “transit” for trips like Tsai’s was meant to placate Beijing.

“The history of the US relationship with Taiwan since the normalization of relations with the PRC has been one in which, as it were, we give an unofficial nature to what are actually quite official relations. with Taiwan,” Wilder said.

He noted that the US diplomatic mission in Taiwan was not called the embassy but rather the “American Institute in Taiwan,” that Taiwan’s mission in Washington had a similar name, and that US officials did not meet with their Taiwanese counterparts in official government buildings. .

“There are a lot of little gestures that we do to, if you will, make Beijing less uncomfortable with the relationship,” Wilder said. “So for a ‘transit’ like President Tsai will make, we’ve always called it ‘for the comfort and safety of Taiwan’s leader,’ rather than calling for any kind of official visit to the United States. ”

“It’s kind of like a fig leaf,” he added.

His predecessor visits Beijing

Tsai’s trip to the United States comes at a particularly tense time in US-China relations, with a visit by then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the island last year, leading to a nadir in relations with Beijing.

Ties between the world’s two superpowers were improving until an alleged Chinese spy balloon it was found floating over the United States in February, prompting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his trip to Beijing at the last minute.

Tsai’s visit also comes as her predecessor Ma Ying-jeou of the opposition Kuomintang is in Beijing.

Ma had sought to improve Taiwan’s ties with Beijing while in office and is the first former Taiwanese president to visit the mainland since the two sides parted ways in the middle of the war in 1949. He arrived on Monday and will be there until May 7. April, the day before Tsai’s return. of the Angels

But the history of unofficial ties between Washington and Taipei causing diplomatic contention goes back much further than Pelosi and Ma.

The practice of furtive trips abroad was started in 1995 by Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui, according to William Overholt, a senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Lee began visiting countries “under the guise of a vacation, and immediately claimed that allowing his visit showed that those countries really recognized Taiwan,” Overholt told RFA.

“Then he used it on us, with the excuse of visiting his alma mater CornellOverholt said. That caused 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis. “Our legislators took the excuse at face value. China reacted to Lee’s broader strategy. It was the biggest Sino-American crisis since 1958.”

“This visit follows that pattern,” he added. “A visit that includes two-day layovers in both directions and high-level government meetings is obviously just a cover for an official visit. This is just a repeat of Lee’s strategy, except this time we’re more receptive to that strategy.”

Don’t mention the war

There has already been a harsh reaction from Beijing, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accusing the US of “concealing and hollowing out the ‘One China’ principle” by allowing Tsai to visit, and Tsai of try to “propagate the independence of Taiwan”.

“We strongly oppose any form of official interaction between the US and Taiwan, we strongly oppose any visit by the head of Taiwan authorities to the US. ‘One China’ principle,” Wang said in a press conference Last Tuesday.

Wilder said Beijing’s reaction to Tsai’s “transit” would depend on how much the question of Taiwan’s possible independence is raised and how the US media and lawmakers talk about her trip.

“This is really the red line, and one that Beijing will watch very closely,” he said. “The danger is that we may love Taiwan too much.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.