TAIPEI (Dispatches) -- Taiwan will boost military exchanges with the United States to curb “authoritarian expansionism”, President Tsai Ing-wen said Tuesday after meeting with visiting U.S. lawmakers.
The five-day U.S. congressional visit comes after a top U.S. defense official reportedly made a rare stopover to the self-ruled island while Washington-Beijing tensions flared over alleged Chinese spy balloons.
“Taiwan and the United States continue to bolster military exchanges,” Tsai said after convening with the U.S. delegation at her office in Taipei.
Tsai did not provide further details on what the future exchanges might entail.
Washington diplomatically recognizes Beijing over Taipei, but is also the self-governing island’s biggest provider of arms and military support.
Beijing, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to seize it one day, opposes any official exchanges with the island and has reacted with anger to a flurry of trips to the island by U.S. politicians in recent years.
In Taipei, Tsai said it was time “to explore even more opportunities for cooperation” between the U.S. and Taiwan.
Relations between Beijing and Washington have grown increasingly tense, and China responded angrily to a Financial Times report about a weekend visit by Michael Chase, the deputy assistant U.S. secretary of defense for China.
The British newspaper said Chase was the most senior Pentagon official to visit the island since 2019.
In Taipei, California representative Ro Khanna, a member of a newly created U.S. House committee on strategic competition with China’s Communist Party, said he was leading the bi-partisan delegation’s visit to expand “the partnership on military and defense” and to shore up ties with the island’s world-leading semiconductor industry.
Khanna added that he “particularly appreciated” a meeting with Morris Chang, founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which is the world’s largest contract chipmaker.
The global semiconductor industry has been upended by an ongoing economic slowdown dampening demand as well as a raft of U.S. export controls aimed at preventing China from obtaining advanced chips.
Relations between the world’s two largest economies dipped to a low point in August as China staged war games near Taiwan following a visit by Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Both sides recently signaled hopes for a reset, but at a weekend meeting with U.S. chief diplomat Antony Blinken, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi accused Washington of harboring a “misguided” perception of Beijing.