A group of 22 Senate Republicans has urged U.S. President Joe Biden not to make any concessions on Taiwan when he meets with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on Wednesday.
“Few issues are more urgent than ensuring Taiwan has the capabilities and training it needs to deter Chinese aggression,” said the statement spearheaded by Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking member.
Biden and Xi are meeting in San Francisco for the first time in a year on the margins of the APEC leaders’ summit. Biden said Tuesday that his main objective was to “get back on a normal course of corresponding” with China, with a view to preventing a crisis between their militaries.
The ongoing tensions in the Taiwan Strait are among the top issues Biden is expected to discuss with Xi, who is visiting the United States for the first time in six years.
China effectively broke off lines of communication with the Pentagon and other government departments after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) visit to Taiwan in August last year. White House and Defense Department officials have expressed a desire to restore dialogue in order to keep potential misunderstandings and miscalculations from escalating into disaster.
“It is paramount that Biden and his administration don’t give an inch on U.S. policy on Taiwan,” the GOP senators said. Taiwan is key to American national and economic security interests as well as to the “future of the entire Indo-Pacific region,” they wrote.
TheWhite House and Risch’s office didn’t return separate written requests for comment before publication.
The U.S. is Taiwan’s main security provider, although like most countries Washington does not officially recognize Taipei diplomatically. The Biden administration, like its predecessors, has so far abided by the U.S. commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which requires the U.S. to ensure the self-ruled island has the capacity to defend itself.
Beijing claims Taiwan is part of its territory, but the Chinese Communist Party-led government has never ruled there.
A senior Taiwanese official told Newsweek on Tuesday there were concerns in Taipei about the Xi-Biden talks and how they could affect Taiwan’s presidential election in January.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
In their letter, the Senate Republicans described Biden’s upcoming meeting with Xi as a mistake. Offering Beijing face time at this juncture would signal America’s willingness to put economic interests above national security, they said.
The U.S. should not “throw any sort of economic lifeline” to the Chinese leader, after “the mess he made of the Chinese economy,” they said.
A variety of economic pressures in China, ranging from slowing growth to a housing market crisis, are believed to be driving Xi’s desire to stabilize ties with the United States.
But China seeks to damage both the U.S.’s national security and its economy, the legislators said. There can be no “‘healthy’ economic competition” with the world’s second-largest economy,” they added, pointing to Chinese intellectual property theft, state subsidization of strategic industries, and “coercive treatment of U.S.-based and international firms.”
The GOP statement said China had not earned a sit-down because of its alleged inaction on stemming the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., and for failing to release Mark Swidan, David Lin and Kai Li—American citizens held in China for years as political prisoners.
The Senate statement comes after the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China published a list of prisoners, including Chinese detainees as well as the aforementioned three Americans, for Biden to present to Xi when they meet.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.