dpa
Washington
Despite heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing over the recent spy balloon downing, a congressional delegation led by US lawmaker Ro Khanna plans to visit Taiwan this weekend, a move sure to be seen by China as a provocation.
Khanna, a Democrat, and a group of Democratic and Republican lawmakers were headed to Taiwan Friday night, aides familiar with planning for the trip told the Los Angeles Times.
They plan to meet with the president of Taiwan in a mission “to bolster ties between Silicon Valley and the Taiwanese semiconductor industry,” Khanna’s office said.
China considers Taiwan to be a renegade province that should be forced back into the communist fold.
Many Taiwanese prefer independence. The island currently enjoys a large degree of self-rule, with a relatively democratic government and close ties to Washington and other Western nations.
“I look forward to learning more about Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and the economic ties between Taiwan and my district of Silicon Valley,” Khanna said in a prepared statement before the trip.
Taiwan is one of the world’s leaders in the production of semi-conductors and Khanna said its work “is critical to my district.” Beijing has long viewed any overtures to Taiwan by US officials or other countries as a threat.
State Department diplomats routinely warn Congress members of the sensitivities and potential fallout from any trip to Taiwan, but lawmakers have the final say about whether to travel.
Administration officials have defended the right of US politicians to visit Taiwan and criticized Chinese reactions.
“China should not use any visit as a pretext to intensify its actions around Taiwan,” a senior State Department official said Friday.
The timing of Khanna’s delegation is, nevertheless, especially fraught.
On February 4, off the coast of South Carolina, US fighter jets shot down a Chinese balloon that had traversed the continental United States on what Washington maintains was a spy mission.
In the days that followed as anxiety over Chinese espionage skyrocketed, the US shot down three more “unidentified aerial objects” flying over the far-northern US and Canada. The Biden administration now says the later three vessels were probably benign and not Chinese spy instruments.
The incident led to a new low in relations between Washington and Beijing.
The first balloon prompted Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a critical trip to the Chinese capital.China meanwhile has responded with angry accusations.
“The overreaction by America - and its moves to heighten the issue - have exacerbated the situation” and “caused new wounds in China-U.S.relations,” Xu Xueyuan, the charges d’affaires at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, wrote in an opinion column in Friday’s Washington Post.
China maintained that the balloon was a weather instrument that strayed accidentally into US airspace.
