McCarthy meets with Taiwan leader as China threatens ‘actions’ in response

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and a bipartisan congressional delegation are meeting Wednesday with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in Simi Valley, California, in a move that has increased simmering U.S. tensions with China.

The Republican House speaker is the highest ranking U.S. official to meet with a leader of Taiwan on U.S. soil since 1979.

Tsai’s meeting with McCarthy follows private meetings she held last week with small groups of U.S. lawmakers. On Friday, she met with three members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in New York City: Sens. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Mark Kelly, D-Ariz.

Also on Friday, Tsai met with House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries in his home state of New York.

Unlike those low-key meetings, however, McCarthy’s afternoon of scheduled events with Tsai will include a group of House members and will feature a public joint appearance covered by the international media.

Even portions of Wednesday’s meeting that were billed as private became public when McCarthy tweeted a photo of him and Tsai speaking one-on-one.

The meeting has infuriated China’s Communist Party leadership and prompted veiled threats from Beijing to members of Congress who will be attending the events. China’s government said it planned to take “resolute actions” to respond to the “provocation.”

In Los Angeles, the Chinese Consulate on Monday warned McCarthy not to “repeat disastrous past mistakes and further damage Sino-U.S. relations.” The consulate was referring to a visit by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Taiwan last August.

That visit prompted furious condemnation from Beijing, including the launch of live-fire Chinese military drills in the Taiwan Strait just hours after Pelosi departed the self-ruling island, whose population exceeds 24 million people.

When McCarthy’s predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., visited Taiwan in August, the first House speaker to do so in 25 years, China responded with unprecedented live-fire drills. 

China views Taiwan as a province of the Chinese mainland, and it considers any attempt by Taiwan’s leaders to act independently of Beijing as a threat to Chinese sovereignty.

Tsai’s weeklong trip to the United States is technically unofficial, and is referred to as a “transit,” rather than a visit. But in reality, Tsai’s packed schedule of high-level meetings with U.S. lawmakers would rival that of any official visit by a world leader.

Tsai’s trip to the United States adds a new strain to the already fragile U.S.-China relationship, weakened in recent years by Beijing’s territorial expansion in the South China Sea and its aggressive effort to control Taiwan.

In February, a Chinese reconnaissance balloon flying over the United States sparked a public outcry, until it was shot down by American fighter jets off the East Coast.

The following month, a U.S. ban on government devices using the social media app TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, drew an angry rebuke from Beijing.

This is a developing story, and will be updated throughout the day.