Pelosi’s Taiwan visit will inflame US-China crisis, analysts warn

US House Speaker’s planned trip could provoke military response from modernised People’s Liberation Army

TAIPEI • China has escalated a campaign of threats and war games to try to dissuade Mrs Nancy Pelosi from visiting Taiwan in the coming days.

Beijing has publicly warned of “forceful countermeasures” to any visit, which would be the first by a United States House of Representatives Speaker in 25 years, and has stepped up naval and air force manoeuvres around Taiwan. Chinese officials have even suggested to US counterparts the possibility of a military response.

So intense has the reaction been to the visit, which is expected to be part of a trip to Asia in the coming week, that many analysts believe Beijing and Washington are heading into a new crisis over Taiwan.

In a conflict that has been frozen since China’s Nationalist government fled to Taiwan in 1949, the US is trying to gauge whether this time the friction could bring it to the brink of war with Beijing.

“If she goes, there will definitely be a Taiwan Strait crisis, and it will definitely exceed the last one in 1995-1996,” said Professor Wu Xinbo, director of the Centre for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. “That is because China’s military capabilities by far exceed those of 26 years ago.”

But Chinese scholars as well as former US officials with first-hand knowledge of the last crisis believe China still wants to avoid open military conflict with the US.