US does not rule out possible military response from China if Pelosi ends up visiting Taiwan, says ‘FT’

China has sent a very harsh private warning to the United States before the planned visit to Taiwan by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi — one of the highest level trips by a U.S. official to the island, over which Beijing claims sovereignty — to the point that U.S. sources consulted by the ‘Financial Times’ do not rule out a Chinese military response to the trip.

According to six U.S. sources, China’s warning is unusually forceful and falls outside the margins of Beijing’s usual condemnations of what it understands as U.S. interference with its “territorial integrity.”

Relations between Beijing and Taipei were suspended in 1949, after the forces of the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang Party, led by Chiang Kai Shek, suffered a defeat in the civil war against the Communist Party of China and moved to the island of Taiwan.

Ties between Taiwan and mainland China were only re-established on a business and informal level in the late 1980s. China regards Taiwan as its rebel province, despite the fact that the island has declared its independence and is supported by the United States and the European Union.

In this context, Pelosi’s possible visit, which could occur in August, would be historic in scope because she would be the first speaker of the lower house of the US Congress to visit Taiwan since Republican Newt Gingrich in 1997, in an announcement to which China warned in public that it would respond “forcefully and forcefully.”

While Beijing did not explain in its warning what measures it might take, the FT’s sources do not rule out, for example, that the Chinese Air Force might prevent the landing of the military plane that will transport Pelosi.

In fact, and according to the same sources, suspicions are so pronounced that US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and other senior National Security Council officials oppose the trip because of the risk of increasing tension with China in the Taiwan Strait, where the Chinese military regularly conducts air raids in the island’s security zone.

It should also be noted that the aggravation of Pelosi’s trip could cloud the expected conversation that US President Joe Biden is scheduled to hold with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, later this month, where Taiwan, the war in Ukraine and tension in the Indo-Pacific region will be among the main topics of discussion.