The president of the United States, Joe Biden, approved this Friday a military assistance package valued at 571 million dollars (about 547.5 million euros) to support the defense and training of the Army of Taiwan, a territory with which Beijing maintains a tense relationship and which he considers one more province under his sovereignty.
This package will include items and services from the US Department of Defense in terms of military education and training, according to a statement published by the White House.
Precisely at the end of November, the United States Government announced an arms sale to Taiwan for a total value of 387 million dollars (about 365 million dollars), which includes spare parts and support for F-16 fighter jets, as well as assistance for Enhanced Mobile Subscriber Equipment (IMSE), according to the Taiwanese newspaper ‘Taipei Times’.
This is the eighteenth arms sale approved by President Joe Biden’s Administration to Taiwan.
Relations between China and Taiwan have deteriorated in recent yearsespecially after the visit in 2023 of the then speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, which was followed by a visit to Washington by a Taiwanese delegation.
This increase in contacts between Washington and Taipei has been harshly criticized by Beijing, which considers the Taiwanese issue a fundamental part of its internal affairs as a country and sees the territory as another province under its sovereignty.
In fact, the Chinese Government has immediately reacted to the announcement by filing a formal complaint. The Foreign Ministry, in a statement published on its website, “strongly deplores and firmly opposes US military assistance and arms sales to the Chinese region of Taiwan.”
For this reason, “it has immediately presented solemn complaints to the United States,” as stated by the Ministry in its statement where it insists, once again, that “the Taiwan question is the core of China’s fundamental interests and the first red line unsurpassed in Sino-American relations.
“The use of force by the United States to help independence” will only cause problems, and its instrumentalization of Taiwan to contain China is destined to fail,” he adds before emphasizing that the Asian giant “will take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard national sovereignty, security and territorial integrity”.
Opposing this position are the Taiwanese independence groups, which claim the island as an independent country. Among them is the current Taiwanese president, Lai Ching Te, who assures that the territory is already a State in itself. During its presidential campaign, China was deploying balloons of this type in the vicinity of the island.
