U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is set to host a meeting Wednesday with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in California.
The planned talks have prompted opposition from China and threats of countermeasures.
Last year, Tsai hosted then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Taiwan, and China reacted by holding its largest live-fire military drills in decades around Taiwan.
China claims Taiwan as its own territory, and its consulate in Los Angeles said ahead of Wednesday’s meeting that Tsai was engaging in such talks to “put on a political show.”
Tsai’s visit to California follows stops in Latin America where she visited with some of Taiwan’s few remaining allies, Belize and Guatemala. Honduras recently announced it was cutting ties with Taiwan in favor of China.
Jerome Cohen, a retired professor at New York University’s School of Law, told VOA that by meeting McCarthy in California, Tsai took a more diplomatic route than hosting McCarthy in Taiwan and potentially reigniting the kind of response that China had to Pelosi’s visit.
“There should be no basis for a strong Beijing reaction,” Cohen told VOA’s Mandarin service. “It makes the PRC, the People’s Republic of China, look very bad and immature at a time when Beijing and Washington should be trying to come together to improve relations, not to make them worse.”
Robert Ross, a professor of political science at Boston College, told VOA’s Mandarin service that Wednesday’s meeting is not necessarily about delivering any concrete results.
“For Tsai Ing-wen, this is about simply establishing a presence in the world, establishing her presence as the leader of Taiwan and her success in meeting with American leaders,” Ross said. “For the speaker, his objective is to establish his credentials as a supporter of Taiwan and as someone who opposes China. The meeting with the President of Taiwan allows him to say ‘I am standing up to China. They don’t want me to do this, but I am going to do it anyway.’”
VOA’s Mandarin service contributed to this report. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.