Published on : 05/08/2022 – 07:32Modified : 05/08/2022 – 07:34
While Beijing, furious at Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, is stepping up military exercises, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives assured Friday from Tokyo that the United States “will not allow” China to isolate the island of 23 million inhabitants.
United States “will not allow” to China to isolate Taiwan, Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said Friday, August 5 in Tokyo, after a visit to Taiwan that aroused the ire of Beijing.
Nancy Pelosi, 82, who was in Japan – the final leg of her Asian tour – for the first time since 2015, angered China by visiting Taiwan on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Beijing considers this autonomous territory of 23 million inhabitants as an integral part of its territory, and responded by launching Thursday unprecedented military exercises around the island, including firing ballistic missiles, some of which would have fallen in Japan’s exclusive economic zone.
“The Chinese carried out these shootings, probably using our visit as a pretext,” commented Nancy Pelosi during a press conference Friday in Tokyo.
They “tried to isolate Taiwan”, she added, recalling that Beijing had in the spring rejected a call from the United States to allow Taiwan’s participation in the annual meeting of the World Health Organization. (WHO). But “they will not isolate Taiwan by preventing us from going there. We had high-level visits, from senators in the spring, in a bipartisan way (…), and we will not allow them to isolate Taiwan” , she launched. “They don’t decide our movements.”
Celebrating Taiwan, “a great democracy”
This tour of the region “was not intended to change the status quo here in Asia, to change the status quo in Taiwan”, assured Nancy Pelosi.
Since 1979, Washington has recognized only one Chinese government, that of Beijing, while continuing to provide support to the Taiwanese authorities, in particular through major arms sales.
This visit, she said, “concerned the ‘Taiwan Relations Act'”, a law passed by the United States Congress in 1979 and which characterizes relations between the United States and Taiwan, but also “the United States- China, all the laws and agreements that established what our relationship is.”
“It’s about celebrating Taiwan for what it is, a great democracy with a thriving economy, with respect for all of its people.”
Regarding Sino-American relations, she said that if the United States “did not speak about human rights in China because of (our) commercial interests, we would then lose all moral authority to talk about human rights anywhere in the world”.
With Archyde.com and AFP