US ‘pushes the envelope’ with health chief’s planned visit to Taiwan

Azar’s team embraced the opportunity to irritate the mainland communist government. Two other Cabinet officials have traveled to Taipei since 2000, but the HHS team emphasized this trip is technically “the highest-level visit by a U.S. Cabinet official since 1979,” when the United States officially severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favor of Beijing. The HHS chief’s visit puts a spotlight on how the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the intensifying geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China.

“Taiwan has been a model of transparency and cooperation in global health during the COVID-19 pandemic and long before it,” Azar said, in an implicit contrast with American frustrations over China’s initial censorship of information about the emerging pandemic. “This trip represents an opportunity to strengthen our economic and public health cooperation with Taiwan, especially as the United States and other countries work to strengthen and diversify our sources for crucial medical products.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sharpened the rebuke after the trip was announced, saying that “China has prevented” Taiwan from participating in World Health Assembly meetings with other nations.

“He’s going there with a deep and important purpose — we’re still in a global pandemic,” Pompeo told reporters Wednesday afternoon. “Taiwan has had some significant success in how they have handled this … We welcome the expertise that Taiwan brings.”

That’s a blow against Beijing’s effort to isolate Taiwan, the last stronghold of the government overthrown during the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. China orchestrated a series of diplomatic setbacks for Taiwan in the last two years, but Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s successful response to the virus — fewer than 500 people on the island have caught the virus, and only a handful of people have died — enabled Taipei to function as a benefactor for Western countries, including the U.S.

“This COVID response has really helped Taiwan on the international stage,” said a source familiar with the planning of Azar’s trip.

The political ramifications of such public health meetings are not lost on China, which has succeeded in blocking Taiwan’s attendance at the World Health Assembly in recent years while lobbying the dwindling number of nations that recognize the island as an independent country to cut their ties.

“China firmly opposes any official interactions between the U.S. and Taiwan,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Weng Wenbin said Wednesday. “For the China-U.S. relationship, the Taiwan question is one of the utmost importance with the highest level of sensitivity, and the one-China principle is the political foundation.”

Azar unveiled his itinerary at a time when American allies in the Indo-Pacific see a growing risk of a violent altercation between the U.S. military and the People’s Liberation Army, which has improved to the point that senior lawmakers suspect that China could invade Taiwan or another neighbor and win — even if the Pentagon tries to intervene.

“I don’t think this increases the possibility of conflict because this has been done before,” the source familiar with the planning said. “I think that when the PRC looks at how they will respond to this, they’re going to take into consideration the different things that are happening both in the region and in the U.S.-China dynamic.”

Lohman suggested that U.S. officials should take the drama out of such events by scheduling more of them. “The important thing going forward is doing it again — making time in someone else’s schedule next year and doing it again,” he said. “We have to break out of the cycle of making this a special thing that only happens every 10 years, [because] the Chinese can complain about it.”