It has been a major point of discussion around the world, however, as the live-fire military exercises China launched in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit raise fears it is looking to change the long-established status quo across the Taiwan Strait.
Chinese officials say it is the United States that is trying to change the status quo by strengthening its unofficial relations with Taiwan, a self-ruling island that Beijing claims as its territory.
“Faced with this, China has no choice but to fight back and defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu told Chinese state broadcaster CCTV on Tuesday.
But either way this latest crisis has sharpened global concerns about the future of the island, a longtime flashpoint in US-China relations and a flourishing democracy in a region where autocracy has been making steady gains.
‘We only want to protect our way of life‘
Lee Ming-che was among the human rights activists who met with Pelosi last week, during the brief visit in which she reiterated Washington’s support for Taiwan.
Lee spent five years in a Chinese prison as a political prisoner. Now, only four months after his release from him and return to Taiwan, Chinese threats to the freedoms he can again enjoy at home are escalating.
“I saw and personally experienced in prison how the Chinese government disregards human rights and the law. And now this kind of country wants to encroach on Taiwan’s democracy and human rights,” Lee told NBC News by phone on Tuesday.
“Because Taiwan’s previous generations have dedicated a lot of effort for Taiwan’s freedom, democracy and human rights, we only want to protect our way of life, to live in our own country, but China uses its military might to threaten Taiwan.”
Beijing’s military exercises around the island have gone further than in the past and than many experts had expected. On Wednesday, a spokesman for China’s Eastern Theater Command said the military had “successfully completed” various tasks around the island but would “carry out military training and preparedness continuously.”
“It is possible we will see the staging of additional military exercises, at intervals, over the coming months,” said Amanda Hsiao, senior analyst for China at the International Crisis Group, who is based in Taipei.
But for generations of people in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled in 1949 after losing to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in China’s civil war, these security concerns are nothing new. Co-existing with Beijing’s threats is simply part of life, which has carried on across Taiwan this summer as usual.
On Dongyin, a Taiwanese island just 31 miles off the coast of China, an electronic dance music rave with clouds of foam, fog and jets from water cannons kicked off on Saturday evening even as China’s military drills were unfolding in the surrounding skies and waters.
This measured approach flies in the face of some rhetoric abroad comparing Taiwan to Ukraine, where many residents reacted with disbelief to Russia’s long-signaled invasion in February. US military experts and former defense officials have warned China’s army is now much more advanced than the last time cross-Strait tensions soared in 1996, leading some to ask whether Taiwan is being too complacent.
“There’s a lot of what feels like judgment from experts in the US looking at Taiwan’s calm reaction and saying people in Taiwan need to take this more seriously, they don’t fully appreciate the circumstance they’re in,” said Lev Nachman, a political scientist and associate professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. “To which I think a lot of the Taiwanese response is, ‘We fully appreciate the circumstance we’re in, we’re just choosing to react to it in a more calm way than you are.’”
Air raid drills are held regularly in Taiwan, and officials are revising a civil defense handbook that was issued earlier this year. But the island also says it needs continued support from the international community.
“This has repercussions for the entire region, which we are all witnessing real-time,” said Enoch Wu, the founder of the Forward Alliance, a nonprofit group that holds public workshops to prepare Taiwanese for conflict and crises. “This is why it is in the common interest of democratic partners to enhance defense alliances now, as the only means of preserving peace and ensuring stability.”