The Chinese Foreign Ministry announced Friday it would take a series of eight measures against the administration of leftist President Joe Biden, including halting “climate” talks and military coordination, in response to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) visiting Taiwan.
Pelosi spent about 19 hours in the island nation this week, meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen and top national legislators, and visiting the country’s human rights museum. Taiwan is a sovereign nation with a functional democratic government that the Chinese Communist Party falsely insists is a “province” of China. America, thanks to the policies of former President Jimmy Carter, indulges this falsehood to maintain diplomatic relations with its top geopolitical threat.
Pelosi repeatedly insisted during her short visit to Taiwan that, while she supported the Taiwanese government, she and her small delegation of fellow congressmen did not want to change the “status quo,” meaning the failure to recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty.
“Our visit is one of several Congressional delegations to Taiwan – and it in no way contradicts longstanding United States policy, guided by the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, U.S.-China Joint Communiques and the Six Assurances,” a joint statement from Pelosi delegation upon arriving in Taiwan read. “The United States continues to oppose unilateral efforts to change the status quo.”
A woman uses her mobile phone as she walks in front of a large screen showing a news broadcast about China’s military exercises encircling Taiwan, in Beijing on August 4, 2022. China’s largest-ever military exercises encircling Taiwan kicked off August 4, in a show of force straddling vital international shipping lanes after a visit to the island by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images)
The Communist Party largely ignored these assurances and responded with ongoing invective against Pelosi and the United States in general, condemning Biden for not violating separation of powers principles to dictator where Pelosi and other lawmakers can travel. Biden, the Foreign Ministry insisted this week, had “a responsibility to stop” the Speaker.
The Foreign Ministry’s announcement on Friday lists several “countermeasures,” with minimal detail, meant to punish the United States for Pelosi’s presence in Taiwan. China, the Ministry confirmed, would halt eight interactions with Washington:
1.Canceling China-U.S. Theater Commanders Talk.
2.Canceling China-U.S. Defense Policy Coordination Talks (DPCT).
3.Canceling China-U.S. Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) meetings.
4.Suspending China-U.S. cooperation on the repatriation of illegal immigrants.
5.Suspending China-U.S. cooperation on legal assistance in criminal matters.
6.Suspending China-U.S. cooperation against transnational crimes.
7.Suspending China-U.S. counternarcotics cooperation.
8.Suspending China-U.S. talks on climate change.
The provisions on military activities – which exist to ensure that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and American armed forces assets do not accidentally or otherwise clash in international waters, particularly in the South China Sea – follow days of bombastic PLA exercises in the waters surrounding Taiwan. China has essentially blockaded the country, shutting down large swathes of Taiwan’s sovereign waters to shoot ballistic missiles into the ocean.
The Biden administration has enthusiastically promoted the ongoing “talks on climate change” that China is suspending as one of the few areas where the two countries could allegedly cooperate. As recently as last week, the White House claimed that Biden emphasized joint efforts to “address climate change” in a call with genocidal Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. In contrast, Chinese government sources claimed that Xi spent the call threatening to kill Biden with fire if the United States misbehaved on Taiwan relations in the eyes of the Communist Party.
“Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Chinese state media quoted Xi as saying, a common refrain from Chinese officials regarding Taiwan. The threats to make supporters of Taiwan “perish” are a slight diplomatic upgrade from Xi’s warning that anyone supporting Taiwan would have their “bones ground to powder” in 2019 that followed the PLA’s woeful performance against the Indian military in a clash on their mutual border in 2020.
Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Hua Chunying speaks during a press conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing on August 4, 2022. (NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images)
Beijing has mostly refrained from similarly gruesome threats during talks involving climate change, as Biden has staked a great deal of political capital on the success of climate negotiations. The Biden administration has described climate change itself as a threat to America on par with the Chinese Communist Party. Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry – whose reported business dealings with Chinese companies severely compromise his ability to properly engage the regime – has stated in the past that climate negotiations with China come “first and foremost” in his administration’s dealings with the communist tyranny and regularly participates in multiple friendly meetings with Chinese Communist Party officials at venues like the World Economy Forum at Davos.
China is the world’s worst polluter as per multiple metrics, including being the largest greenhouse gas emitter, home to the world’s largest pile of plastic garbage, and the world’s illegal fishing powerhouse. It has made no commitments to reduce its carbon emissions in the near future – the Paris Agreement, which China is a party to, allows China to continue increasing emissions for another decade. The Communist Party is the most prolific builder of coal power plants in the world and has recently bragged about using fossil fuels to avoid blackouts and other power concerns currently facing Europe, as much of the continent has chosen to attempt to replace fossil fuels with “green” alternatives.
The “counternarcotics cooperation” that China canceled on Friday largely centers on talks to stop China from importing massive amounts of fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, into the United States. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), China is a major driver of the illegal production of false “prescription” opioids killing Americans, a crisis that talks with Beijing has done little to ameliorate.
“China is providing chemicals to Mexico, to the criminal drug networks that are then mass-producing these fake prescription pills,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram explained in April. “They’re being sold as if they were Xanax, as if they were Oxy, as if they were Percocet. But there’s no Xanax, no Oxy, no Percocet in them. They’re fentanyl.”
Chinese government officials and media has called its documented role in America’s fentanyl crisis “blatant slander” and blamed American culture for overdose deaths.