The Chinese side wishes a speedy recovery to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who previously tested positive for coronavirus, Beijing believes that she should not postpone, but cancel her visit to Taiwan, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a briefing on Friday.
Earlier media reported that a delegation led by Pelosi will travel to Japan in the coming days and then visit the island of Taiwan. It was reported that the visit, which will inevitably provoke protests from Beijing, could be the first visit to the island since 1997 by the speaker of the US House of Representatives. Drew Hammill, a spokesman for the speaker’s administration, later revealed that Pelosi had tested positive for the coronavirus.
“The Chinese side has already clearly expressed its position regarding the visit of Speaker Pelosi to Taiwan, China has already made strict representations to the United States in this regard,” the diplomat said.
Zhao Lijian expressed his sympathy to Pelosi for having contracted the coronavirus and wished her a speedy recovery.
“What she should do is not postpone her visit to Taiwan, but cancel it immediately,” he added.
Official relations between the central government of the PRC and its island province were interrupted in 1949, after the Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek, defeated in a civil war with the Chinese Communist Party, moved to Taiwan. Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the parties began to contact through non-governmental organizations – the Beijing Association for the Development of Relations across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Foundation for Cross-Strait Exchanges.
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