Taipei: The visit by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to Taiwan this week comes amid mounting tensions between Washington and Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its own territory to be annexed by force if necessary.
From the South China Sea to TikTok, Hong Kong and trade, China and the US find themselves at loggerheads just months ahead of the American presidential election. In a throwback to the Cold War, the two ordered tit-for-tat closures of consulates in Houston and Chengdu and rhetorical sniping is now a daily occurrence.
Washington potentially exacerbated those frictions by sending Azar to Taiwan, making him the highest-level US official to visit the self-governing island democracy since formal diplomatic relations were severed in 1979 in deference to China, Beijing has been ratcheting up pressure on Taiwan, but that’s just one area in which its increasingly assertive foreign policy and the accompanying push-back from Washington have taxed diplomacy on both sides.
Washington drew Beijing’s ire last month when it parted with years of ambiguity by explicitly denying most of China’s claims in the strategically vital South China Sea.
China says it owns the waterway and that activity in the area by the US.= Navy, including sailing ships close to Chinese-controlled islands, threatens regional peace and stability. Other disputes center on economic and cultural issues.
A two-year-old tariff war has buttressed US actions targeting Chinese institutions and officials.
Washington has been campaigning to exclude Chinese telecoms giant Huawei from the US and its allies, a push China sees as a bare-knuckled attempt to restrain its development as a global technology power.
The US says Huawei is beholden to China’s ruling Communist Party and threatens to compromise personal data and the integrity of the information systems in the companies in which it operates. China says there is no proof of that.
President Donald Trump stepped-up the technology confrontation on Thursday with an executive order banning dealings with the Chinese owners of consumer apps TikTok and WeChat, possibly leading to their becoming unavailable in the lucrative U.S. market.
The US has sanctioned Chinese companies and officials over the persecution of Muslims in the northwestern region of Xinjiang and has now turned its eye toward stricter Chinese control in Hong Kong. (AP)