After McCarthy meet, Taiwan Prez will return home to Chinese fireworks

Taipei: Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who is ostensibly on an unofficial visit to the US, will come home to live-fire from the Chinese military as the latter are scheduled to start from April 7 near the delta of the Pearl River in the Guangdong province.

According to a report by Taiwan News, the drills come in the wake of Tsai’s meeting with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California on Wednesday.

According to the report, owing to the live-fire drills, ships were instructed to stay out of a marked area near the delta between Hong Kong and Macau on Friday from 11 am to 3 pm.

Earlier, tensions in the Taiwan Strait reached a head when on April 5, China and the US deployed their aircraft carriers in the area in the wake of the Tsai-McCarthy meeting.

After the meeting, the Chinese foreign ministry had issued an unveiled threat. “In response to the seriously erroneous acts of collusion between the United States and Taiwan, China will take resolute and effective measures to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the foreign ministry said.

Moreover, as a reaction to the meeting, China’s Fujian maritime safety administration has begun a three-day special joint patrol and inspection operation in the centre and northern areas of the Taiwan Strait that involves attempts to board ships, according to Reuters.

The operation included “on-site inspections” of direct cargo ships and construction vessels on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, according to the maritime safety authority in the province in southeast China, on Wednesday.

According to reports, China’s aircraft carrier Shandong was spotted 200 nautical miles East of Taiwan, while the American aircraft carrier USS Nimitz remained at nearly 400 nautical miles off.

Meanwhile, McCarthy, who is second in line to the US presidency, said a shared belief in freedom and democracy underpinned a relationship that was “a matter of profound importance to the free world.”

He vowed US arms sales to Taiwan — which infuriated the Chinese leadership — would continue, in what he said was a proven strategy to dissuade aggression.

“And what we know through history, the best way to do that is supply the weapons that allow people to deter war,” he told reporters at the library, north of Los Angeles.

“It is a critical lesson that we learned through Ukraine, that the idea of just sanctions in the future is not going to stop somebody” who wants to wage war.

Despite having all the trappings of a fully functioning state, only a handful of countries acknowledge Taiwan as a sovereign nation.

With inputs from agencies

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