Will Donald Trump meet Taiwan’s next vice-president on private trip to Washington?
- Pro-independence advocate William Lai is expected to attend a prayer breakfast, raising possibility of meeting with the US president
- Visit is most high-profile call in US from Taiwanese politician in decades
Lai is expected to attend the annual National Prayer Breakfast in the US capital on Wednesday, setting up the possibility of a meeting with President Donald Trump.
Lai, a vocal advocate of formal independence for Taiwan, will not hold an official government position until he is sworn in in May and is travelling in a private capacity. But his trip is the most visible to the US capital by a senior Taiwanese politician since the US severed ties with the democratically run island in 1979.
The visit comes after incumbent President Tsai Ing-wen, Lai’s running mate, won re-election in a landslide last month.
“Lai is a pretty radioactive figure for Beijing as he is seen as a [stalking] horse for independence within Tsai’s circle,” said Shelley Rigger, a political science professor focusing on Taiwan and China at Davidson College in North Carolina. “Beijing will react strongly, so there’s a lot of risks for Taiwan and Tsai in a meeting between Lai and Trump.”
Taiwanese politicians frequently travel to the US, but visiting Washington itself has remained off-limits to senior government officials for American fears of angering Beijing, which claims the island as part of its territory.
The trip by Lai – who served as premier under Tsai between 2017 and 2019 – is the latest signal of staunch US support for Taiwan in recent years, including Congress’s passing the Taiwan Travel Act to encourage more cabinet-level Taiwanese officials to visit the US and the Trump administration’s approval of a US$8 billion sale of 66 new F-16 fighter jets to the island last year.
Taiwanese sending equipment, messages of solidarity to Hong Kong protesters
It will not be the first time Trump has angered Beijing over Taiwan. As president-elect, he accepted a phone call from Tsai, the first time an incoming US commander-in-chief had had direct contact with a Taiwanese leader in 40 years.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi dismissed the call as a “little trick pulled off by Taiwan”.
Since Tsai first took office in 2016, Beijing has frozen all contact with Taipei and steadily increased diplomatic, military and economic pressure on her government, including attempts to lure away the island’s few remaining allies. Lai’s visit could invite further sanctions from Beijing.
“It’s entirely possible that [Trump] will freak out if he gets criticised too heavily or he comes under pressure with his phase one [trade] deal,” Rigger said. “No matter what happens, it will just intensify pressure on Taiwan more.”
A Japanese colony for the first half of the 20th century, Taiwan came under the control of China’s Nationalist government after the second world war. It became a refuge for Chiang Kai-shek and his troops as they fled the Communists at the end of the civil war in 1949.
