SIMI VALLEY, United States: Risking China’s ire, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy welcomed Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to a high-level meeting on US soil as a “great friend of America” on Wednesday in a fraught show of US support.
More than a dozen Democratic and Republican lawmakers, including the House’s third-ranking Democrat, joined Republican McCarthy for the talks at southern California’s Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, against a backdrop of rising tensions between the US and China.
The members of Congress rose to their feet to greet the Taiwanese leader at a long table lined with bouquets. The formal trappings of the meeting, and the senior rank of some of the elected officials, in themselves threatened to run afoul of China’s position that any interaction between US and Taiwanese officials is a challenge to China’s claim of sovereignty over the island.
McCarthy said he wanted the Taiwan president to see that “this is a bipartisan meeting of members of Congress,” not any one political party.
“We will continue to find ways for the people of America and Taiwan to work together to promote economic freedom, democracy, peace and stability in Asia,” the House speaker said.
The United States broke off official ties with Taiwan in 1979 while formally establishing diplomatic relations with the Beijing government. The US acknowledges a “one-China” policy in which Beijing lays claim to Taiwan, but it does not endorse China’s claim to the island and remains Taiwan’s key provider of military and defense assistance.
For Tsai, it was the most sensitive stop on a weeklong journey meant to shore up alliances with the US and Central America. The US House speaker is second in line of succession to the president. No speaker is known to have met with a Taiwan president on US soil since the US broke off formal diplomatic relations.
China has reacted to past trips by Taiwanese presidents through the US, and to past trips to Taiwan by senior US officials, with shows of military force.
The Chinese responded to a visit by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan last August with its largest live-fire drills in decades, including firing a missile over the island.
Chinese officials have pledged a sharp but unspecified response to the meeting with McCarthy. There was no immediate reaction from China on Wednesday, a holiday there.
However, Chinese vessels started a joint patrol and inspection operation in the central and northern waters of the Taiwan Strait, state media announced Wednesday morning. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said Wednesday evening it had also tracked the Chinese Army’s Shandong aircraft carrier passing through the Bashi Strait, to Taiwan’s southeast.
China’s “deliberate action has jeopardized regional stability and caused tension in Taiwan Strait,” Taiwan’s defense ministry said. “However, external pressures will not hinder our determination to move toward the world & defend our country.”
The Biden administration insists there is nothing provocative about this visit by Tsai, which is the latest of a half-dozen.
“The first thing to emphasize is that these transits by high-level Taiwanese authorities are nothing new,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Wednesday during travel in Europe. “They are private, they are unofficial, but they are nothing new.”
“Given that, Beijing should not use the transits as an excuse to take any actions, to ratchet up tensions, to further push at changing the status quo,” Blinken said.
“There’s no reason for the Chinese to overreact in any way,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Wednesday. “We’ll watch this as closely as we can.”
The Taiwan president’s visit to America comes as China, the US and its allies are strengthening their military positions and readiness for any confrontation between the two sides, with Taiwan and its claim to sovereignty a main flashpoint. Confrontation between the US and China, a rising power increasingly seeking to assert its influence abroad under President Xi Jinping, surged with Pelosi’s visit and again this winter with the cross-US journey of what the US says was a Chinese spy balloon.
Taiwan and China split in 1949 after a civil war and have no official relations, although they are linked by billions of dollars in trade and investment. China regularly flies fighter planes and bombers near Taiwan to emphasize its stance that the island is obliged to eventually unite with the mainland, by force if necessary.
When President Jimmy Carter formally established diplomatic relations with the Beijing government. Congress responded by writing into law that the US would nonetheless retain close ties with Taiwan.
For their part, Taiwanese officials in the United States – and Taiwanese presidents on a succession of visits – aim for a delicate balance of maintaining warm relations with their powerful American allies, without overstepping their in-between status in the US, or unnecessarily provoking China.
To that end, no Taiwanese flag flies over the former Taiwan Embassy in Washington.
Taiwanese presidents call their stops in the US “transits” rather than visits. They avoid Washington on their itineraries as well as any public meetings between their top-level officials and those of the US on American US soil.
McCarthy, who has seldom made forays into foreign policy, is trying to steer Republicans – and many Democrats – into taking a tougher approach to China.
As the newly elected House speaker, he started a Select Committee on China that is probing many aspects of Chinese actions in the US and abroad. Joining him for the bipartisan meeting were the Republican chairman and ranking Democrat on that panel, along with the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee that handles tax policy important to Taiwan, and lawmakers who are military veterans and members of the Armed Services Committee, among others.
The venue, at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley about 50 miles outside of Los Angeles and near McCarthy’s own home district, evokes an era when the Republican Party played a more substantial role on global matters. In contrast, McCarthy’s GOP includes a strong non-interventionist wing that is more skeptical of involving the US overseas.
US House leader, Taiwan president meet as China protests
https://arab.news/n2k5t
US House leader, Taiwan president meet as China protests
- McCarthy said he wanted the Taiwan president to see that “this is a bipartisan meeting of members of Congress,” not any one political party
- The United States broke off official ties with Taiwan in 1979 while formally establishing diplomatic relations with the Beijing government
Afghan returnees in Bamiyan struggle despite new homes
- More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan: Sitting in his modest home beneath snow-dusted hills in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province, Nimatullah Rahesh expressed relief to have found somewhere to “live peacefully” after months of uncertainty.
Rahesh is one of millions of Afghans pushed out of Iran and Pakistan, but despite being given a brand new home in his native country, he and many of his recently returned compatriots are lacking even basic services.
“We no longer have the end-of-month stress about the rent,” he said after getting his house, which was financed by the UN refugee agency on land provided by the Taliban authorities.
Originally from a poor and mountainous district of Bamiyan, Rahesh worked for five years in construction in Iran, where his wife Marzia was a seamstress.
“The Iranians forced us to leave” in 2024 by “refusing to admit our son to school and asking us to pay an impossible sum to extend our documents,” he said.
More than five million Afghans have returned home since September 2023, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as neighboring Iran and Pakistan stepped up deportations.
The Rahesh family is among 30 to be given a 50-square-meter (540-square-foot) home in Bamiyan, with each household in the nascent community participating in the construction and being paid by UNHCR for their work.
The families, most of whom had lived in Iran, own the building and the land.
“That was crucial for us, because property rights give these people security,” said the UNHCR’s Amaia Lezertua.
Waiting for water
Despite the homes lacking running water and being far from shops, schools or hospitals, new resident Arefa Ibrahimi said she was happy “because this house is mine, even if all the basic facilities aren’t there.”
Ibrahimi, whose four children huddled around the stove in her spartan living room, is one of 10 single mothers living in the new community.
The 45-year-old said she feared ending up on the street after her husband left her.
She showed AFP journalists her two just-finished rooms and an empty hallway with a counter intended to serve as a kitchen.
“But there’s no bathroom,” she said. These new houses have only basic outdoor toilets, too small to add even a simple shower.
Ajay Singh, the UNHCR project manager, said the home design came from the local authorities, and families could build a bathroom themselves.
There is currently no piped water nor wells in the area, which is dubbed “the dry slope” (Jar-e-Khushk).
Ten liters of drinking water bought when a tanker truck passes every three days costs more than in the capital Kabul, residents said.
Fazil Omar Rahmani, the provincial head of the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation Affairs, said there were plans to expand the water supply network.
“But for now these families must secure their own supply,” he said.
Two hours on foot
The plots allocated by the government for the new neighborhood lie far from Bamiyan city, which is home to more than 70,000 people.
The city grabbed international attention in 2001, when the Sunni Pashtun Taliban authorities destroyed two large Buddha statues cherished by the predominantly Shia Hazara community in the region.
Since the Taliban government came back to power in 2021, around 7,000 Afghans have returned to Bamiyan according to Rahmani.
The new project provides housing for 174 of them. At its inauguration, resident Rahesh stood before his new neighbors and addressed their supporters.
“Thank you for the homes, we are grateful, but please don’t forget us for water, a school, clinics, the mobile network,” which is currently nonexistent, he said.
Rahmani, the ministry official, insisted there were plans to build schools and clinics.
“There is a direct order from our supreme leader,” Hibatullah Akhundzada, he said, without specifying when these projects will start.
In the meantime, to get to work at the market, Rahesh must walk for two hours along a rutted dirt road between barren mountains before he can catch a ride.
Only 11 percent of adults found full-time work after returning to Afghanistan, according to an IOM survey.
Ibrahimi, meanwhile, is contending with a four-kilometer (2.5-mile) walk to the nearest school when the winter break ends.
“I will have to wake my children very early, in the cold. I am worried,” she said.
