FPI / March 15, 2023
Geostrategy-Direct
By Richard Fisher
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used the March 6 week of its “Two Sessions” to sow terror against Taiwan and the United States, convincing both to delay a visit by U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Instead, the two will meet when Taiwan President Tsai Ing Wen visits the U.S.
Proving that in effect Chinese coercion can work, Tsai convinced McCarthy to meet with her in California during an April visit to the United States, according to March 6 report in the Financial Times. The intent was to avoid giving China an excuse to stage a second large scale military exercise/blockade around the island, such as the one that followed former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit.
But instead of conciliation, China’s new Foreign Minister Qin Gang used a March 7 press conference on the sidelines of the CCP’s National People’s Congress, to make China’s most explicit threat of “conflict and confrontation” if the U.S. did not curtail its support for democratic Taiwan. He stated:
“If the United States does not pump the brakes and continues to go down the wrong road, no number of guardrails will be able to stop [the relationship] from running off-road and flipping over, and it is inevitable that we will fall into conflict and confrontation.”
Indeed, promoting confrontation has been the mission of the CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for last five years, deploying air force and navy formations to coerce Taiwan into eventual surrender as it used the August 2022 visit of Pelosi to unleash an unprecedented joint missile, space, air and naval joint force coercion-blockade campaign against Taiwan.
But in addition, during the Chinese People’s Consultative Congress, CCP member and controversial author Zhou Xiaoping proposed a resolution calling for China to create a “blacklist of Taiwan separatist figures” that would be killed during a Chinese invasion of the island.
The resolution was distributed on Chinese social media so it would be known in Taiwan
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