Taiwan’s president addressed members of New York’s Taiwanese community in a US stopover on her way to Central America as she seeks to rally allies of the self-ruled island amid tensions with China.
Pro-China demonstrators waving the Chinese flag rallied against President Tsai Ing-wen’s events in New York. One protester held a sign whose slogan declared the Taiwanese leader a “big traitor of China.”
In a speech on Wednesday night to fellow Taiwanese in New York, Tsai thanked the United States for its security assistance and urged Taiwanese unity. “The safer Taiwan is, the safer the world will be,” she said, and pledged Taiwan would work with its democratic partners to remain on the path of democracy.
Tsai arrived in New York on Wednesday and was expected to spend Thursday in closed events in the city. Taiwan is carefully calibrating Tsai’s stops in the United States and forgoing official meetings with senior US leaders in Washington in an effort to limit the scale of China’s response.
On Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning restated China’s furious objections to any interactions between Tsai and US officials. “China firmly opposes any form of official interaction between the US and Taiwan,” Mao told reporters at a daily briefing in Beijing. “China will continue to closely follow the situation and resolutely safeguard our sovereignty and territorial integrity.” A senior Chinese diplomat in Washington, embassy charge d’affaires Xu Xueyuan, pointed to an expected meeting between Tsai and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, likely next week. The meeting would have significant repercussions overall and a “serious, serious, serious” impact on US-China relations, she said in a virtual session with reporters on Wednesday.
While the US terms relations with Taiwan as unofficial, it remains the island’s chief source of military hardware and cooperation. US law requires Washington to treat all threats to the island as matters of “grave concern,” but does not explicitly say whether the US would commit troops.
Sen Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he hopes any US officials meeting unofficially with the president convey that American support for Taiwan is “strong and unequivocal.”
