Fresh Taiwan trip by US lawmakers sparks more PLA drills, Washington branded a troublemaker
The People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command engages in a live-fire drill with precision-guided munitions, targeting waters off Taiwan, on Aug 4. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
China has hit back over the latest trip to the Taiwan region by United States’ lawmakers by conducting renewed military drills around the island and vowing to take resolute measures to safeguard the nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The five-member congressional delegation led by Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, arrived in Taiwan on Aug 14.
The two-day trip came less than two weeks after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a provocative trip to Taiwan. China responded to her visit with a series of countermeasures and military drills in the seas and airspace around the island.
As a solemn deterrent against the US and Taiwan continuing to play political tricks and undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits, the Eastern Theater Command of the People’s Liberation Army conducted combat patrols involving troops of multiple branches of the military and live-fire exercises in the Taiwan region on Aug 15, Senior Colonel Shi Yi, a spokesman for the theater command, said in a statement.
Senior Colonel Wu Qian, a spokesman for the Ministry of National Defense, said on Aug 15 that the delegation’s visit fully exposed Washington as a troublemaker and saboteur of cross-Straits peace and stability.
“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army will continue its military training and war preparation efforts, resolutely safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and resolutely crush any form of ‘Taiwan independence’ separatism and external interference attempts,” Wu said.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the US lawmakers’ trip sent an erroneous signal to the “Taiwan independence” separatist forces and violated the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiques.
China urges the US to stop going further down on the wrong path of obscuring, hollowing out and distorting the one-China principle to avoid further damage to bilateral ties and cross-Straits peace and stability, Wang said in a regular news briefing in Beijing.
“A handful of US politicians who colluded with ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists with the attempt to challenge the one-China principle are overestimating themselves and are doomed to fail,” he said.
Ma Xiaoguang, spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said on Aug 15 that some people in the US are not learning from the grave consequences of Pelosi’s provocative move.
The trip exposed Washington’s malicious intention of “using Taiwan to contain China” and Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, authorities’ attempt to “seek independence by relying on external forces”, Ma said, warning the DPP to restrain its attempts to solicit foreign support in seeking “Taiwan independence” and make further provocations.
“Otherwise, it will suffer more severe blows,” Ma said.
On the second day of Pelosi’s visit to the Taiwan region, China announced suspension of imports of some fruit and fish from Taiwan and imposed curbs on export of natural sand to Taiwan.
In a white paper titled “The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era” which was released on Aug 10, the Chinese government gave a comprehensive overview of the history and policies on the Taiwan question.
Resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China’s complete reunification is a shared aspiration of all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, the white paper said.
In an article published on Aug 15 in the US-based Current Affairs magazine, Nathan J. Robinson, a Colorado congressman, and Noam Chomsky, a US academic, said that US officials have been deliberately taking steps that they know will anger China, such as Pelosi’s visit.
They pointed out that the deterioration of US-China ties threatens the whole world and said the US must “stop needlessly stoking conflict, think about how things look from the Chinese perspective, and work sincerely to understand and collaborate with a country of 1.4 billion people we have to share a planet with.”
