Taiwan Strait

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    U.S. Lawmakers Visit Taiwan and Vow Support in Face of Chinese Military Drills

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    A bipartisan delegation promised to stand by the island’s newly elected president, Lai Ching-te, after Beijing surrounded the self-governing island with naval vessels and aircraft.After China performed two days of military drills intended to punish Taiwan, Representative Michael McCaul of Texas on Monday stood alongside the island nation’s newly elected president, Lai Ching-te, and issued a promise.“The United States must maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force or coercion that would jeopardize the security of the people of Taiwan,” Mr. McCaul, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said. “That is what we stand for, and that is what we continue to say.”Mr. McCaul, a Republican, traveled this week to Taipei with a bipartisan delegation of other American lawmakers in an attempt, he said, to show that the U.S. government stood in lock step with Mr. Lai and Taiwan.The trip, which will last through the week, comes at a fraught time: Just days after Mr. Lai was sworn into office and vowed in his inaugural address to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty, China responded by surrounding the self-governing island with naval vessels and military aircraft. Before the lawmakers arrived, the Chinese government had publicly warned them to “seriously abide by the one-China policy” and “not to schedule any congressional visit to Taiwan.”Just a few days ago, China “conducted two days of military drills in the Taiwan Strait to express their displeasure with President Lai,” Lin Chia-lung, Taiwan’s foreign minister, told Mr. McCaul at a news conference on Monday. “You can say in this critical time, it is a powerful display,” Mr. Lin added.Even as many Republicans in Congress balked at providing continued U.S. military aid to Ukraine, support for Taiwan has remained a largely bipartisan endeavor. A number of conservatives have argued that the United States should pull back its investments in Ukraine and instead bolster deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region. In April, the House voted to approve $8 billion for Taiwan in a lopsided 385-to-34 vote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      China Launches Military Drills Around Taiwan as ‘Punishment’

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      China said the sea and air drills were meant as a “stern warning” to its opponents after Taiwan’s new president asserted the island’s sovereignty in defiance of Beijing.China launched two days of military drills starting Thursday surrounding Taiwan in what it called a “strong punishment” to its opponents on the self-governing island, after Taiwan’s new president pledged to defend its sovereignty as he took office.The drills were the first substantive response by China to the swearing in of President Lai Ching-te, whom Beijing dislikes, in Taipei on Monday. Mr. Lai’s party asserts Taiwan’s separate status from China, and in a high-profile inaugural speech on Monday, he vowed to keep Taiwan’s democracy safe from Chinese pressure.China, which claims Taiwan as its territory, has mainly responded to Mr. Lai’s speech with sharply worded criticisms. But it escalated its response Thursday by announcing that it was conducting sea and air exercises that would encircle Taiwan and draw close to the Taiwanese islands of Kinmen, Matsu, Wuqiu and Dongyin in the Taiwan Strait.China did not say how many planes and ships it was deploying in the exercise, but the last major drill in multiple locations around Taiwan that China has conducted was in April of last year in response to the visit to Taiwan by the former House speaker, Kevin McCarthy.“Such exercises put pressure on Taiwan and its outlying islands and have threatened the regional stability and increased the risks of conflicts,” said Ou Si-fu, a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, which is affiliated with Taiwan’s defense ministry. Li Xi, a spokesman of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, said the exercises served as “strong punishment” for “Taiwan independence forces,” according to Chinese state media, and “a stern warning against the interference and provocation by external forces,” a reference to the United States.Even as he pledged to protect Taiwan, Mr. Lai had sought to strike a conciliatory note in other ways, signaling that he remained open to holding talks with Beijing — which China had frozen in 2016 — and to resuming cross-strait tourism. But China took offense to Mr. Lai’s assertion that the sides were equal — he had said that they “are not subordinate to each other” — and his emphasis on Taiwan’s democratic identity and warnings against threats from China.After the speech, Beijing accused Mr. Lai of promoting formal independence for Taiwan and said the new president was more dangerous than his predecessors. Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, said this week: “The ugly acts of Lai Ching-te and others who betray the nation and their ancestors is disgraceful,” according to China’s foreign ministry. “All Taiwan independence separatists will be nailed to the pillar of shame in history.”Taiwanese officials and military experts have been expecting China to make a show of military force after Mr. Lai’s inauguration. Ma Chen-kun, a professor at Taiwan’s National Defense University, said that the pressure from the People’s Liberation Army was likely to continue, including around the Kinmen and Matsu islands, which are Taiwanese controlled islands close to the Chinese mainland.Chris Buckley More

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      The Death of a Treaty Could Be a Lifesaver for Taiwan

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      Since pulling out of an arms-limitation agreement with Russia in 2019, the U.S. has quickly developed new weapons that could be used to stop a Chinese invasion force.During a military exercise with the Philippines that began last month, the U.S. Army deployed a new type of covert weapon that is designed to be hidden in plain sight.Called Typhon, it consists of a modified 40-foot shipping container that conceals up to four missiles that rotate upward to fire. It can be loaded with weapons including the Tomahawk — a cruise missile that can hit targets on land and ships at sea more than 1,150 miles away.The weapon, and other small mobile launchers like it, would have been illegal just five years ago under the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibited U.S. and Russian forces from having land-based cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges between about 300 miles and 3,400 miles.In 2019, President Donald J. Trump abandoned the treaty, in part because the United States believed Russia had violated the terms of the pact for years. But U.S. officials said that China, with its growing long-range missile arsenal, was also a reason the Trump administration decided to withdraw.The decision freed the Pentagon to build the weapons that are now poised to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. It also coincided with a rethinking of modern war by U.S. Marine Corps leaders. They recommended retiring certain heavyweight and cumbersome weapons like 155-millimeter howitzers and tanks — which they thought would be of little use against Chinese forces in the Pacific — and replacing them with lighter and more flexible arms like truck-mounted anti-ship missiles.At the time, the Pentagon had no land-based anti-ship weapons. Other militaries, however, already did. Then in April 2022, Ukrainian ground troops used a similar weapon, Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles launched from trucks, to sink the Russian cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea.A New Pacific Arsenal to Counter ChinaWith missiles, submarines and alliances, the Biden administration has built a presence in the region to rein in Beijing’s expansionist goals.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More