Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou defended his visit to a disputed island in the South China Sea on Thursday (Jan 28) despite criticism from the United States and protests from the other claimants as tensions swirl in the region.
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The incoming party leans toward independence for Taiwan, which Beijing claims to be part of China. The visit was criticized by the USA, which said the move could aggravate tensions in the region.
Taiwan stations about 200 coast guard personnel, scientists and medical workers on the island.
President Ma flew to Taiping on a C-130 cargo plane on Thursday morning to offer Chinese New Year wishes to the island’s residents and to reiterate his call for peaceful coexistence and joint development in the region.
The island, about 1,450 kilometers southwest of Taiwan, is home to an aircraft-landing strip, a wharf, a lighthouse and freshwater resources, making it a strategic asset for Taipei in the busy sea lanes around the Spratly islands.
The US has argued that the islands do not fall under claims of sovereign territory, and sent a guided missile cruiser, the USS Lassen, within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef, the site of one of China’s maritime constructions, in October previous year.
It’s hard to knock Taiwan too much for standing their ground, but with everything else going on in the world right now this is just one more headache that we really don’t need.
Ma’s trip comes barely two weeks after his Nationalist Party was soundly defeated by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) led by Taiwan’s president-elect Tsai Ing-wen, who is said to have refused the outgoing chief executive’s invitation to join the trip. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei have competing claims. “The Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait all have the responsibility to safeguard the ancestral property of the Chinese nation”, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters.
The Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the Chinese civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communists.br / br / China has appeared unfazed by Taiwan’s upgrading work on Itu Aba.
On a visit to Beijing on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington and Beijing needed to find a way to ease tensions in the South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year.
Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou listens to a question during a news conference before his upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, at the Presidential Office in Taipei, Taiwan, November 5, 2015.
OTHER RESPONSES – The Philippines expressed concern over the trip, and U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the United States was disappointed by it. “We view it as, frankly, as raising tensions rather than what we want to see, which is de-escalation”, Toner said.
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The U.S. takes no position on who owns the islands, but says developments in the South China Sea are a matter of national security.
