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Taiwan’s Vice President Lai Ching-te before a news conference in Taipei on July 5, 2023.
CNN –
Taiwan’s Vice President Lai Ching-Te is expected to travel through the United States en route to Paraguay next month, the island’s presidential office announced at a news conference on Monday.
The Biden administration expects the transit to be “without incident,” a senior government official said Sunday.
The transit comes as the Biden administration works to regulate the pace of diplomacy with Beijing, with three senior government officials visiting China last month.
While any visit by Taiwanese officials to the US usually frustrates Beijing, the official said Taiwan is planning a “low-key” transit, though they did not say whether Lai would meet US officials.
“These transits of senior officials are unofficial, in line with our US one-China policy,” the official said, calling the transits fairly frequent. “We’ve had ten vice presidential changes in the last 20 years. Everything went without incident.”
As part of the “One China” policy, the US recognizes China’s position that Taiwan is part of China, but has never officially recognized Beijing’s claim to the self-governing island of 23 million people. The US provides Taiwan with defensive weapons, but has deliberately remained unaware of whether it would intervene militarily in the event of a Chinese attack.
A trip by an official from Taiwan to the US is referred to as a “transit” rather than a visit because the US does not have formal diplomatic relations with the government of Taiwan and the stopover is part of an unofficial trip on the way to another destination.
Lai is not expected to visit Washington in his role as Vice President.
“Lais Transit will be private and unofficial,” the official said. He last traveled through the USA in January 2022.
Notably, however, Lai is not just a current official: the ruling Democratic Progressive Party has nominated the vice president as its presidential nominee for 2024. Candidates from other political parties could also visit the United States later this year, but the senior government official gave no details on possible future trips.
Taiwan is less than 110 miles (177 kilometers) off the coast of China. The two sides have been governed separately for more than 70 years, but that hasn’t stopped the ruling Chinese Communist Party from claiming the island — although it has never controlled it.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning reacted to the news of the transit in a press conference on Monday. “China firmly opposes any ambush visit to the US by ‘Taiwan separatist forces’. “We refuse the US to condone and support the ‘Taiwan Separatist Forces’ and their separatist acts,” Mao said.
When Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen toured the United States earlier this year and met with Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy in California, China responded by holding three-day military exercises near Taiwan. During the exercises, several Chinese warplanes penetrated the southeastern part of the island’s air defense zone – a self-declared buffer that extends beyond the island’s airspace.
The announcement from Taiwan via Lais Transit comes while the Biden administration’s climate chief, John Kerry, is in Beijing. His trip follows visits from Foreign Secretary Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
“We have made it quite clear to the Chinese, both publicly and behind closed doors, that we hope and urge that communications continue even at times when tensions may arise,” the official said. “It’s a crucial part of managing competition by maintaining channels of communication and preventing conflicts from occurring.”
As the US seeks to improve ties with China, the Biden administration also plans to provide Taiwan with additional security aid in the form of a Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) military aid package, senior US officials said, which also includes military equipment directly taken from US stocks.
However, that package was delayed by several months, in large part due to an accounting error that forced government officials to really estimate the value of the equipment the US will ship to Taiwan, several US officials told CNN.
The accounting error is similar to a mistake the government made in the aid packages it provided to Ukraine under the PDA agency, officials said. In the Ukraine cases, military officials counted the value of the replacement weapon in US inventories and not the value of the actual weapon being sent to Ukraine, leading the government to overestimate the actual monetary value of the aid packages.
A similar flaw was spotted with the Taiwan aid package a few months ago, but several defense officials told CNN it’s already been fixed.
When asked by CNN about the PDA on Sunday, the senior administration official said they couldn’t give a specific timeline, but acknowledged it took “a little longer than we would normally expect.”
“This is the first time we’ve created a Taiwan PDA,” the official said, “and it has taken a little longer than we would normally expect, due in part to the reassessment of some costs associated with the PDA.” This was not only a Taiwan problem, but of course also a Ukraine problem. But we expect to have news on that soon.”