Taipei: China vowed reprisals against Taiwan Thursday after a meeting between the US House Speaker and the island’s President, saying the US was on a “wrong and dangerous road.”
Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday in a show of US support for the self-ruled island, which China claims as its own, along with a bi-partisan delegation of more than a dozen US lawmakers.
The Biden administration has said there is nothing provocative about the visit by Tsai, which is the latest of a half-dozen to the US Yet, it comes as as the US-China relationship has fallen to historic lows, with US support for Taiwan becoming one of the main points of difference between the two powers.
But the formal trappings of the meeting, and the senior rank of some of the elected officials in the delegation from Congress, could lead China to view it as an escalation. No speaker is known to have met with a Taiwan president on US soil since the US broke off formal diplomatic relations in 1979.
In response to the meeting, Beijing said it would take “resolute and forceful measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” in a statement issued early Thursday morning by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It urged the US “not to walk further down a wrong and dangerous road.”
By Thursday afternoon, there was no overt sign of a large-scale military response as of Thursday afternoon as China had done previously.