The arrival in Taipei of five members of the US Congress on Sunday caused a new anger of Beijing who relaunched important military maneuvers.
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Chinese military maneuvers around and above Taiwan started after the visit in early August of Nancy Pelosi, president of the American House of Representatives, were barely finished as a new delegation from Washington landed on the island. The arrival, Sunday, August 14, of five members of the Congress led by the Democratic Senator Ed Markey caused new anger of Beijing which again proceeded to important maneuvers. According to the Taiwanese authorities, fifteen Chinese planes have crossed this time the midline which is considered to be the unofficial border between China and Taiwan – Beijing has never recognized it. These tensions mark a real escalation in relations between the two banks of the Taiwan Strait and, therefore, between Beijing and Washington.
These visits to parliamentarians are not unusual. In the past ten years, according to a count of the Taiwanese authorities, 71 American elected officials had gone to the island during the second presidency of Barack Obama (2012-2016), 35 during the term of Donald Trump and 31 since the arrival at Joe Biden’s White House. But in the context of increasing rivalry between the United States and China, they take on another dimension.
“China believes that the traditional policy of a single China is evolving towards a policy” a China, a Taiwan “. It is not a relevant reading of the American vision of Taiwan but that explains Why China reports more clearly than ever its desire to attack, “notes the former Australian Prime Minister, the sinologist Kevin Rudd, in the Wall Street Journal . The will of certain American elected officials to give up Washington’s “strategic ambiguity” with regard to Taiwan and to recognize the island as a “major ally outside NATO” and to provide it with weapons accordingly can only strengthen the China in his convictions.
The hawks are on the rise
In China, the debates are obviously less transparent but everything indicates that, there too, the hawks are on the rise. In any case, censorship lets the nationalists regret, for example, that Chinese aviation did not prevent Nancy Pelosi from landing in Taiwan in early August. And the Chinese ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, allows himself to say that once the reunification is completed, the Taiwanese will have to be “re -educated”, the term used by Beijing to define its policy with regard to the Uighurs in the Xinjiang.
President Xi Jinping did not speak on the subject. Like every year at the same time, Chinese leaders are also invisible. They are most likely gathered in Beidahe, this seaside resort located 200 kilometers east of Beijing where they prepare for the start of the school year as informal as secret. It is undoubtedly there that the last arbitrations are made for the XX e Congress of the Chinese Communist Party which, this fall, will grant a third term as secretary general to XI Jinping.
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