Taiwan is at the center of a major political storm. China and the US are at odds over how to deal with the island. According to the Taiwanese newspapers Liberty Times and United Daily News, Nancy Pelosi, who is the speaker of the House of Representatives in the United States, will visit the island from Tuesday to Wednesday. It ignites an already heated war of words between the major powers. Pelosi is touring Asia and has already visited Singapore. Officially, the tour continues from there to Malaysia, South Korea and Japan, and Taiwan is not mentioned on the itinerary. Rumors of the Pelosi visit have spread fear on the stock exchanges in Asia. The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong fell by 3.2 percent, while China’s CSI 300 index fell by 2.8 percent. There is also a decline on the stock exchange in Taiwan and Japan on Tuesday morning Norwegian time. Nancy Pelosi with Azhar Azizan Harun, Speaker of the Lower House of the Parliament of Malaysia on Tuesday. Photo: AP – Will travel by military plane Chinese authorities have warned that the country’s military forces “will not sit idle”, should Pelosi visit Taiwan. Nancy Pelosi’s planned travel destinations on her East Asia tour are marked in blue, and Taiwan is marked in blue. A possible counter-reaction that could come is China firing artillery into the Taiwan Strait, John Kirby told reporters Monday night. Kirby is a spokesperson for the US Security Council. – The Speaker (Pelosi, ed.) has every right to visit Taiwan. We want to make sure that she can travel safely, said Kirby, who also confirmed that Pelosi is traveling by military aircraft. If she travels, Pelosi will become the most senior US politician to visit Taiwan since her predecessor Newt Gingrich did the same in 1997. TO MEET PHYSICALLY: Biden and Xi have a video meeting last November. On Thursday last week, the two presidents had another such virtual meeting, and agreed to meet physically. Photo: JONATHAN ERNST / Reuters Warned against “playing with fire” Just a few days after Pelosi’s travel plans became known, Biden was on the phone with Chinese President Xi Jinping, hoping to ease tensions. The conversation lasted two hours and touched on several other topics, but there was no doubt that Taiwan was in focus. The message from Xi was clear: “Those who play with fire will get burned.” Xi and Biden also agreed to meet physically. It will be the first time the two meet since Biden was inaugurated as president in January 2021. The US and China are in communication with each other about Pelosi’s expected visit, reports China’s foreign policy spokesperson, Hua Chunying, at a press conference on Tuesday. The Communist Party and President Xi believe that Taiwan is part of China. They have stated several times that the island should be reunited with the mainland. Perhaps even by force. On Tuesday, a source told Reuters that Chinese fighter jets flew over the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and the mainland. Then it does not suit the Chinese that American politicians like Pelosi visit Taiwan. It can be interpreted as a form of recognition, and a strengthening of the US’s security guarantees. The conflict between Taiwan and China Photo: AP Taiwan and China have been separated since 1949. Then Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese nationalists lost the civil war that had ravaged China for the past 20 to 30 years. Mao Zedong and the Communists rolled into Beijing with tanks, establishing the People’s Republic of China on the mainland. At the same time, Chiang’s Republic of China continued on Taiwan. Formally, the two countries are still at war, and believe they should rule the whole of China, i.e. the mainland and Taiwan. Taiwan had long had the support of Western countries, and even sat on the UN Security Council. But in the 1970s, fortunes turned. Countries such as the United States, France, and Great Britain began to recognize China, sending Taiwanese diplomats home. Today, only 13 countries, mainly in Latin America and the Pacific, recognize Taiwan as the “rightful” China. Inspired by Ukraine – Prepares for Invasion Pelosi’s possible visit will come just days after Taiwan conducted major military exercises. According to the Ministry of Defense in Taiwan, the five-day exercise is characterized by the fact that the military has taken with it lessons from the war in Ukraine. Almost the entire Taiwanese population also participated in an exercise to simulate how to protect themselves from air raids. Several experts now believe that the danger that China will actually invade Taiwan is increasing. – The risk will be higher the further into the decade we enter, said CIA chief William Burns a couple of weeks ago. – This is the biggest question of the 21st century. The potential for conflict is great, emphasizes professor at the Department of Defense Studies, Øystein Tunsjø. WATCHING CHINA’S POWER GROW: Professor at the Norwegian Defense Academy, Øystein Tunsjø, said in “Dagsnytt 18” on Monday evening that China’s opportunities and willingness to invade Taiwan increase with each passing year. Photo: Philippe Bédos Ulvin / news – In contrast to the rivalry between the USA and the Soviet Union, this is not on land in Europe, but out at sea. This means that the US can defend Taiwan with conventional military means. They don’t need to threaten China with nuclear weapons. I therefore do not think there will be any balance of terror that maintains the peace between the US and China in the coming years in East Asia, Tunsjø elaborates. CRITICAL OF CHINA: Nancy Pelosi holds a banner in memory of those who died during the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing with representatives Ben Jones and John Miller during a visit to China in 1991. Photo: AP What does Biden say? On Monday evening, a statement about Pelosi’s travel plans came from the White House: – We are not going to take the bait or join in the saber rattling. At the same time, vetch will scare us. Speaker Pelosi has every right to visit Taiwan. But when US President Joe Biden was asked what he thought about Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan last week, he didn’t exactly give the green light: – The military thinks it’s a bad idea right now, he told reporters. OLD ACQUAINTANCES: Xi Jinping and Joe Biden stand in front of a shelf of Chinese language textbooks in a California library in 2012, when Xi had just been named chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and Biden was vice president. Photo: Damian Dovarganes / AP Although Pelosi and President Joe Biden are both from the Democratic Party, Biden cannot give Pelosi guidelines for what she should and should not do. The two politicians are leaders of separate branches of the state apparatus: Pelosi the legislative, Biden the executive. unequivocally: Joe Biden answers unequivocally “yes” when asked if the US would defend Taiwan if China invaded while on a trip to Japan in May. At the same time, China believes that Biden has a responsibility to appear with a unified political line. China may have become extra cautious after Biden unequivocally stated in May that the US would defend Taiwan if China invaded. White House advisers were quick to make it clear that the US still stood by its desire to maintain the current situation on Taiwan. But it is unclear how much the Chinese leadership trusts it.
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