Foreign Minister Joseph Wu (???) said Saturday he was not able to comment on or confirm reports that he is due to visit the United States next week.
Wu’s comments come following a report in the Financial Times Saturday, which said the foreign minister and Secretary-General of the National Security Council Wellington Koo (???) would travel to the U.S. next week to hold “a special diplomatic dialogue” with senior U.S. administration officials.
According to the report, Wu and Koo are set to visit the American Institute in Taiwan’s Virginia headquarters to meet with Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Principal Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer.
Mutual visits of Taiwanese government officials and their American counterparts to each other’s country have become more frequent since the Taiwan Travel Act was signed into law by former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2018, lifting unspoken restrictions for such visits that had been in place for 40 years.
Wu — who was mainly briefing the press about the government’s plans for private donations to Turkey on Saturday — also declined to comment on a separate Financial Times report from Friday, which stated Michael Chase, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, had visited Taiwan after wrapping up a visit to Mongolia.
Chase’s purported trip was also picked up by the United Daily News (UDN), which cited unnamed sources as stating earlier on Saturday that Chase had visited Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense and its Taipei-based think tank, the Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
The UDN report also said that Chase had met with members of the opposition Kuomintang.
If Chase was indeed in Taipei, that makes him the second high-level official from the U.S. Department of Defense to visit Taiwan since 2019, when Heino Klinck, the then-deputy assistant secretary for East Asia, visited the country.
Beijing, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory, has long opposed official contact between Taiwanese and U.S. officials. It conducted days of large-scale military exercises near Taiwan shortly after then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi briefly visited Taipei last August.
The reports about Wu’s planned U.S. trip and Chase’s visit to Taiwan come amid tensions between Beijing and Washington after the latter dispatched an F-22 stealth fighter jet on Feb. 4 to shoot down a Chinese balloon drifting over North America.
The Chinese government claimed that the balloon was a civilian aircraft conducting meteorological research, but the U.S. said it had been dispatched by the Chinese military for surveillance purposes.
Following that incident, three other suspicious flying objects have been shot down by the American military over U.S. territory in the past two weeks, while Beijing has also accused Washington of flying balloons in Chinese airspace.
On Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden told the media that he was planning to talk with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to “get to the bottom” of the incidents.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel