McCarthy’s meeting with Taiwan leader follows fears Pelosi’s visit made the island less secure

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says he has no plans to visit Taiwan, which should come as a relief to many Taiwanese people who believe Nancy Pelosi’s trip to the island last summer made them less secure by raising tensions with China.

Mr. McCarthy met with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in California this week, defying repeated threats from Beijing, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province. But he said he has “nothing scheduled now” for a reciprocal visit.

The meeting in California came as a survey showed that a majority of Taiwanese people felt Mrs. Pelosi’s visit last August was detrimental to their security.

In September 2022, respondents to a Brookings Institution survey “overwhelmingly believed that Pelosi’s trip and the large-scale People’s Liberation Army exercises created a serious threat to Taiwan,” the think tank said in a report.

“Somewhat surprisingly, this response was similar across the political partisan divide in Taiwan,” the authors wrote on Wednesday.
In a follow-up survey in January, a majority of Taiwanese residents “still believed that Pelosi’s visit made Taiwan less secure,” the report said. But partisan differences were clearer than four months earlier.

A majority of supporters of the opposition party KMT and independents still believed (as well as one-third of Ms. Tsai’s ruling DPP party) that Mrs. Pelosi’s visit had made Taiwan less secure. A 52% majority of DPP supporters felt the opposite was true.

China reacted to Mrs. Pelosi’s trip, the highest-level visit by a U.S. representative to Taiwan in a quarter century, with a dramatic increase in military drills around the island and suspended diplomatic communications with the U.S. on various topics.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said China used Mrs. Pelosi’s visit “as a pretext to attempt to undermine [the] status quo.” Last month he said, “And you can look at all of the actions, the coercive actions that sought to do little more than intimidate Taiwan and the broader region and to undermine the status quo that has been at the crux of peace and security across the Taiwan Strait.”

In rare praise for her congressional adversary, Mrs. Pelosi commended Mr. McCarthy for his meeting with Taiwan’s president.

“The meeting between President Tsai of Taiwan and Speaker McCarthy is to be commended for its leadership, its bipartisan participation and its distinguished and historic venue,” Mrs. Pelosi said in a statement.

Mr. McCarthy said the bond between the U.S. and Taiwan “is stronger now than at any time or point in my lifetime.”

“America’s support for the people of Taiwan will remain resolute, unwavering and bipartisan,” he said.

Brookings said its survey results “suggest that many [Taiwan] voters essentially lean toward the ideas embedded in the traditional U.S. policy of dual deterrence: Taiwan is more secure when the PRC’s aggressive intentions are countered and when the PRC is assured that U.S. policy does not encourage formal independence.”