WASHINGTON-
China cut off contacts with the United States on vital issues on Friday, including military issues and crucial climate cooperation, as concerns grew that the communist government’s hostile reaction to House Speaker Nancy Nancy’s visit to Taiwan Pelosi, could signal a lasting and more aggressive approach toward her United States. rival and the self-governed island.
China’s decision to freeze key lines of communication compounded a souring in relations over Pelosi’s visit and China’s response with military exercises off Taiwan, including launching missiles into surrounding waters.
After the White House summoned China’s ambassador, Qin Gang, on Thursday night to protest the military exercises, White House spokesman John Kirby on Friday condemned the decision to end an important dialogue with China. United States as “irresponsible”.
The White House spokesman criticized China’s “provocative” actions since Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, which China claims as part of its territory. But Kirby noted that some channels of communication remain open between military officials in the two countries. He repeated daily assurances that the United States had not changed its policy toward the communist mainland and autonomous island.
“The bottom line is that we will continue our efforts to keep opening lines of communication that protect our interests and our values,” Kirby said. He declined to discuss any damage to long-term relations between China and the United States, putting that discussion on hold for later.
Taiwan put its military on alert and held civil defense exercises, but the general mood remained calm on Friday. Flights have been canceled or diverted and fishermen have remained in port to avoid Chinese drills.
On the Chinese coast off Taiwan, tourists gathered to catch a glimpse of military aircraft.
A minister at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Jing Quan, told reporters that Pelosi’s support mission for Taiwan’s democratic government has had “a severe impact on the political foundations of Sino-US relations. integrity and. .. undermines peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
In the long term, a significantly more contentious relationship between China and the US threatens a balance in which the administrations of Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping have argued over human rights, trade, competition, and myriad other issues, but avoided direct conflict and have had occasional high-level contacts on other issues, including reducing climate-damaging emissions.
A joint agreement between the United States and China to combat climate change reached by Xi and then-President Barack Obama in November 2014 is seen as a turning point that led to the historic 2015 Paris agreement in which nearly every nation in the world they pledged to try to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases. Seven years later, during the climate talks in Glasgow, another deal between the US and China helped ease the hurdles to another international climate deal.
China and the United States are the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 climate polluters, together producing nearly 40% of all fossil fuel emissions.
Ominously, experts on US-China relations warned that China’s diplomatic and military moves appeared to go beyond retaliatory measures for the visit and could usher in a new, more openly hostile and more uncertain era for democratic rule. from Taiwan.
Relations between China and the United States are “in a downward spiral,” said Bonnie Glaser, head of the German Marshall Fund’s Asia program.
“And I think China is likely to change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait in ways that will be harmful to Taiwan and will be disadvantageous to the United States,” Glaser said.
In recent years, other rounds of tensions between China and its neighbors on the Indian border, regional islands and the South China Sea have ended with China asserting new territorial claims and enforcing them, said John Culver, a former national intelligence officer. of East Asia, now a senior member of the Atlantic Council. The same thing could happen now in Taiwan, Culver said. “So I don’t know how this ends. We’ve seen how it starts.”
China’s moves this week are the latest steps aimed at punishing the US for allowing the visiting island it claims as its own territory to be forcibly annexed if necessary. China launched threatening military exercises off the coast of Taiwan on Thursday, running through Sunday.
Some missiles were sent flying over Taiwan, Chinese officials told state media, a significant increase in China’s threat to the island.
China routinely complains when Taiwan has direct contacts with foreign governments, but its response to Pelosi’s visit (she was the highest-ranking US official in 25 years) has been unusually strong.
It seems to derail a rare encouraging note: high-level in-person meetings between top officials in recent months, including defense chiefs at an Asia security conference in Singapore and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. at a Group of 20 Meeting in Indonesia.
Those conversations were seen as steps in a positive direction in an otherwise poisoned relationship. Now, the talks have been suspended even on the climate, where the envoys of the two countries have met several times.
China stopped short of disrupting economic and trade talks, in which it hopes Biden will remove tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump on imports from China.
On Friday, China’s Foreign Ministry said the dialogue between regional commanders and the heads of the US and Chinese defense departments would be cancelled, along with talks on military maritime security. Cooperation on the return of illegal immigrants, criminal investigations, transnational crime, illegal drugs and climate change will be suspended, the ministry said.
China’s actions come ahead of a key congress of the ruling Communist Party later this year in which President Xi is expected to win a third five-year term as party leader. With the economy reeling, the party has fueled nationalism and launches almost daily attacks on the government of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, which refuses to recognize Taiwan as part of China.
China said on Friday that more than 100 fighter jets and 10 warships have taken part in live-fire military exercises around Taiwan in the past two days. In addition, mainly symbolic sanctions were announced against Pelosi and his family.
On the coast of China, fighter jets could be heard flying overhead, and tourists taking photos chanted, “Let’s take back Taiwan,” looking out over the blue waters of the Taiwan Strait from Pingtan Island, a popular scenic spot in China. the Chinese province of Fujian.
Pelosi’s visit has stirred emotions among the Chinese public, and the government’s response “makes us feel that our motherland is very powerful and gives us confidence that Taiwan’s comeback is an irresistible trend,” said Wang Lu, a tourist from the neighboring Zhejiang province.
China is a “powerful country and will not allow anyone to offend its own territory,” said Liu Bolin, a high school student visiting the island.
China’s insistence that Taiwan is its territory and its threat to use force to regain control have appeared in statements by the Communist Party, the education system, and the state-controlled media for more than seven decades since the sides split. split in the midst of civil war in 1949.
Taiwanese residents are overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining the status quo of de facto independence and reject China’s demands that the island be unified with the mainland under communist control.
Beyond Taiwan, five of the missiles fired by China fell in Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone off Hateruma, an island far to the south of Japan’s main islands, Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said. He said that Japan protested the missiles to China as “serious threats to the national security of Japan and the security of the Japanese people.”
In Tokyo, where Pelosi is wrapping up her Asia trip, she said China cannot prevent US officials from visiting Taiwan.
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AP journalist David Rising reported from Phnom Penh. AP writers Huizhong Wu in Taipei, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, and Seth Borenstein and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed.