The United States is deeply concerned about Chinese military exercises near Taiwan and calls on Beijing to show restraint, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Saturday.
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“The United States is deeply concerned about Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) joint military exercises in the Taiwan Strait and areas around Taiwan. We are closely monitoring China’s actions and coordinating our steps with allies and partners regarding our shared concerns,” Miller, whose statement was released by the American diplomatic service, said.
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As the diplomat emphasized, Washington calls on Beijing to show restraint and considers it unacceptable to use the change of administration in Taiwan as a pretext for any military provocations. According to Miller, such actions on the part of the PRC are fraught with escalation and undermining “long-standing norms that have allowed for decades to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.”
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“The United States remains committed to its long-standing ‘one China’ policy and is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act and the three joint communiqués,” Miller said.
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The PLA’s Eastern Combat Command Zone on Thursday morning began two days of joint military exercises around Taiwan involving land, navy, air force and missile forces to test the level of combat readiness of troops.
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The PLA exercises began three days after the island’s new chief Lai Qingde took office and is expected to continue his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen’s push for island independence. Beijing has repeatedly said that Taiwan’s independence is incompatible with peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, and that Taiwan “is an inalienable part of China’s territory, and Taiwan’s affairs are China’s internal affairs.”
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The situation around Taiwan worsened significantly after Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the US House of Representatives, visited the island in early August 2022. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned Pelosi’s visit as US support for Taiwanese separatism and held large-scale military exercises.
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Official relations between the central government of China and its island province were interrupted in 1949 after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in the civil war with the Chinese Communist Party, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties began to contact through non-governmental organizations – the Beijing Association for the Development of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.
