TAIPEI – On Feb 21, Mr Joseph Wu walked through a front door – and people started talking.
After all, it was not any regular entrance. It was the front door to the Washington headquarters of the American Institute of Taiwan (AIT), which acts as the US government’s representative in dealing with Taiwan.
And Mr Wu is Taiwan’s Foreign Minister.
It was the first time – at least publicly – that the island’s top diplomat was visiting the US capital area since 1979, when Washington switched official diplomatic ties from Taipei to Beijing.
Taiwanese media outlets called it a “major breakthrough” in US-Taiwan relations and noted that Mr Wu entered the building through the front door for all to see. There was no surreptitious ducking in through the back. He even turned, smiled cheerily and waved at cameras and reporters who had been primed for his visit.
Unsurprisingly, those few seconds of footage dominated media coverage in Taiwan for days to come.
According to Taiwan’s state-run Central News Agency, Mr Wu was at AIT – just 5km from the White House – to hold closed-door meetings with senior US officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Mr Daniel Kritenbrink, the State Department’s top diplomat for East Asia.
In the video clip, Mr Wu is pictured alongside Taiwan’s National Security Council secretary-general, Mr Wellington Koo, and the island’s representative to the US, Ms Hsiao Bi-khim.
Neither Washington nor Taipei has confirmed that a meeting took place but the US officials were also spotted entering the building on the same day.
“Someone had to leak some details of the visit to the media, or they wouldn’t have been waiting there to take pictures,” said Assistant Professor Ma Chun-wei, a political scientist from Taiwan’s Tamkang University.
“In allowing the visit to be made quite public that way, the US is sending a message to China that it is fully in control of how it wishes to deal with Taiwan – that it’s up to them, and not Beijing,” he added.
Dr Kharis Templeman, a political scientist from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, noted how it is also about sending a “signal of support” for Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s government.
“Her administration has committed to important shifts in Taiwan’s overall defence posture – and while the US has long called for these changes, until recently Taiwan leaders have declined to implement them because of their fear of domestic backlash,” he said, citing the island’s large increase in its defence budget and changes to arms procurement.
“The US publicity about government-to-government engagement is politically beneficial for President Tsai and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).”
As the relationship between the US and China continues to sour, Taiwan under a DPP government headed by Ms Tsai is emerging as a beneficiary of diplomatic manoeuvring, though detractors said such developments merely inflame cross-Taiwan Strait relations.
The visit took place weeks after the US shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon, though the trip would likely have been planned long before that incident.
“Before the US-China rivalry reached such a low point, it’s rare for the US to allow such high-level Taiwan officials to make such public trips there because the US didn’t want to antagonise China as much as possible,” said Associate Professor Yeh Yao-yuan, director of the Taiwan and East Asia Studies Programme at the University of St Thomas in the US.
“But now, the US is less hesitant about offending Beijing as it cannot appear to look weak in its competition with China,” he noted. He added that the US is also “pushing boundaries” to test China’s reaction.
That said, the US is showing some caution by holding the meeting at the AIT instead of the State Department which Ms Hsiao visited in 2021.
Said Prof Ma: “If the Taiwan delegation visited the State Department, that would be a big deal.”
So far, Beijing’s response has been fairly muted, though its foreign ministry spokesman warned at a regular press conference that official meetings between Taiwan and the US would increase tensions in the region.
Dr Yeh said: “The trip was around the same time as the first-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and China was too busy dealing with its response to that.”
Ms Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Programme at Washington-based think-tank German Marshall Fund, is not convinced that details of the trip were deliberately exposed to reporters for any purpose.
But there is one difference here. “The media is paying more attention than it used to to Taiwan,” she said.
Mr Wu is not the only one crossing the Pacific Ocean.
In the same week of his trip, the Pentagon’s top China official, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Michael Chase landed in Taipei. In a similar fashion, the trip was not officially confirmed by either side but details were published by media outlets.
Days before that, US Representative Mike Gallagher, chair of a new House select committee on China, travelled to Taiwan to meet Ms Tsai and Vice-President William Lai. The Taipei government confirmed the meeting only after Mr Gallagher’s departure.
US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is expected to make his way to Taiwan as well in the coming months. There is some speculation that Mr Wu’s meeting at AIT was to in part to discuss how to deal with Beijing’s response to that.
But the increase of such high-level exchanges, even if done under the guise of secrecy, comes with risks, said Mr Andrei Lungu, president of Bucharest-based The Romanian Institute for the Study of the Asia-Pacific.
“Beijing might perceive that the status quo is shifting towards a Taiwan that acts like a normal, sovereign country, even without a formal declaration of independence, and thus decide to use military force to take over Taiwan in a shorter time frame than it otherwise would have done,” he added.
China recently sent the most warplanes near the island in almost two months, which came as the US approved the sale of $833 million worth of arms to Taiwan.
When Mr McCarthy’s predecessor, Ms Nancy Pelosi, arrived in Taipei in August 2022, Beijing responded with massive war games amounting to an air-and-sea blockade of the island.
On what its reaction to Mr McCarthy’s visit could look like, Dr Yeh said: “It would depend on what the relationship between the US and China is at that point, but both sides will keep testing the waters for each other’s reaction in their great competition.
“Taiwan happens to be in the middle of it all.”
