China’s anger over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) long-discussed visit to Taiwan is “absolutely justified,” according to Russian officials.
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“What is connected with this tour and a possible visit to Taiwan is a pure provocation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday. “We want to emphasize once again that we are absolutely in solidarity with China. Its attitude towards the problem is understandable and absolutely justified.”
Pelosi’s itinerary remains unconfirmed in public, but Taiwanese and U.S. forces in the region are on alert ahead of a visit expected to include an overnight stay. The stop marks the second trip to Taiwan by the speaker of the House and the first since 1997, but Chinese officials have backed a demand for the cancellation of the trip with a series of bellicose public threats, which are being carried out first in the form of economic pressure on Taiwan.
“China announces import bans of more than 100 Taiwan firms from the food & agriculture industries,” Taiwanese lawmaker Wang Ting-yu tweeted Tuesday, local time. “We will not be intimidated by PRC’s weaponization of trade.”
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A cyber attack briefly took down Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s website, the presidential office told reporters Tuesday morning in the hours prior to Pelosi’s reported landing time. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is expected to step up harassment of Taiwanese air defenses during and after the visit.
“Beijing will give Taipei a hard time,” the South China Morning Post quoted “a military source close to” the PLA as saying.
BREAKING: Taiwan’s Presidential Office just confirmed that at around 17:15 local time, the Presidential Office’s website was hit by an overseas DDoS attack. The attack traffic was 200 times that of a normal day, causing the official website to be down for 20 minutes. (1/2)
— Tingting Liu 劉亭廷 (@tingtingliuTVBS) August 2, 2022
A prominent Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman warned that “the military will not sit idly by” if Pelosi visits, and a Chinese propagandist asserted that Beijing “has the right to forcibly dispel Pelosi’s plane” and even to “shoot them down,” but he deleted that tweet. Other observers closer to the PLA have implied that Chinese forces are not prepared for a war over Taiwan.
“The possibility of Pelosi visiting Taiwan shows the stand-off between Beijing and Washington has escalated, which demands that the PLA push forward with military reforms to become a real modern fighting force,” former PLA instructor Song Zhongping told the SCMP this week.
Chinese Communist officials claim sovereignty over Taiwan, which became the last refuge of the government overthrown during the Chinese Civil War when Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. The United States has never taken a clear position on the issue but instead severed official relations with Taipei in order to establish formal diplomatic ties with the mainland Communist regime while implementing a federal law that required U.S. officials to equip Taiwan’s military against the possibility of a Chinese Communist invasion.
Biden’s team has signaled their dislike for the idea of the visit at this juncture, but they have acknowledged that Pelosi has the authority to set her own travel plans and emphasized that the stop would not imply that the U.S. plans to upgrade international relations with Taiwan.
“Many members of Congress go to Taiwan, including this year,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Monday at the United Nations. “And so, if the speaker does decide to visit, and China tries to create some kind of crisis or otherwise escalate tensions, that would be entirely on Beijing. We are looking for them, in the event she decides to visit, to act responsibly and not to engage in any escalation going forward.”
In February, Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin issued a joint communique in which each endorsed the position of the other with respect to Ukraine and Taiwan, published just weeks before the beginning of the Russian campaign to overthrow the Ukrainian government.
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“Washington brings destabilization to the world,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on social media. “Not a single conflict has been settled over past decades yet many have been provoked.”
