BEIJING (AP) — China will take “decisive and strong measures” if U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes ahead with reported plans to visit Taiwan, China’s foreign ministry said Tuesday.
Pelosi, who is second in line for the presidency, is due to visit the self-governing island claimed by China in August, according to a report in the Financial Times.
He was originally supposed to visit her in April, but had to postpone it after he tested positive for COVID-19.
Pelosi will be the most senior US lawmaker to visit the close US ally since her predecessor as Speaker Newt Gingrich visited there 25 years ago.
China has vowed to annex Taiwan by force if necessary and has advertised that threat by flying warplanes near Taiwanese airspace and conducting military exercises based on invasion scenarios. It said the moves were aimed at deterring defenders of the island’s formal independence and foreign allies – mainly the US – from coming to its aid, more than 70 years after the countries split amid civil war.
Pelosi’s visit would “seriously undermine China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, seriously affect the basis of Sino-US relations and send a seriously wrong signal to Taiwan’s pro-independence forces,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijiang told a daily briefing.
“If the US insists on taking the wrong path, China will take decisive and strong measures to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Zhao said.
China has also stepped up its rhetoric on US arms sales to Taiwan in recent days, pushing for the cancellation of an estimated $108 million deal that would have increased its armed forces’ chances of survival against its much larger foe. China has the world’s largest standing army, with an increasingly sophisticated navy and a vast array of missiles aimed across the 180-kilometer (100-mile) wide Taiwan Strait.
“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army … will resolutely thwart any form of interference by outside forces and separatist plots for ‘Taiwan independence,'” the defense ministry said in a statement posted on its website on Tuesday.
While Washington maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity” over whether it would defend Taiwan in a conflict with China, US law requires it to ensure the island has the means to defend itself and to view threats to its security as matters of “serious concern “.
Washington maintains only informal relations with Taiwan out of deference to Beijing, but is the island’s strongest political ally and source of defensive weapons.
Zhao did not elaborate on what potential actions China might take in response to Pelosi’s visit, but Beijing has generally used military flights and war games to express its displeasure. Chinese pilots have also been accused of aggressively targeting surveillance planes from the US and its allies operating in international airspace off China’s coast while using lasers and other methods to harass foreign warships in the South China Sea.
China’s most serious threat against Taiwan came in 1995-96, when it held military exercises and fired missiles into waters north and south of the island in response to a visit to the US by then-President Lee Teng-hui.
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