Taiwan Leader’s U.S. Visit Is Purposely Low-Key
Cautious atmosphere surrounds Tsai Ing-wen’s stops in New York, while in China, her predecessor gets red-carpet welcome
NEW YORK—It is the highest-profile U.S. visit by a Taiwan leader in years. Nonetheless, President Tsai Ing-wen is keeping largely out of the public eye.
A U.S. stopover that began Wednesday in New York marks Ms. Tsai’s first foreign travel since mid-2019 and comes at a time of heightened tensions with China that many fear could veer into future armed conflict.
U.S. diplomatic protocol with China dictates that any visit by a Taiwanese leader will be low-key. The atmosphere for Ms. Tsai’s two-night New York visit was so cautious that invitations to a reception hosted in her honor Thursday by the conservative think tank Hudson Institute initially didn’t mention her name or the event’s location, only referring to “a very special guest.”
Behind closed doors at the event, Ms. Tsai discussed opportunities to expand trade with the U.S. and possible deals such as a taxation treaty that could tighten their links and underscore shared values, according to Miles Yu, a senior fellow and director of Hudson Institute’s China Center. The president also said Taiwan has learned from Ukraine’s self-defense in the face of Russian aggression: “We will not act rashly, but we will never bow to pressure,” Mr. Yu quoted her as saying.
Her first daytime stop in the city Thursday was an out-of-the-way Brooklyn bakery, where the president told a Wall Street Journal reporter she wasn’t supposed to be interviewed.
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Meanwhile, China rolled out the red carpet for her predecessor, who has favored closer ties with Beijing and this week embarked on a 12-day jaunt across the mainland, where he has met Communist Party officials and was featured in state-media reports.
The split-screen effect from the two trips adds to challenges that threaten to muddle the message Ms. Tsai has said she wanted to convey: that Taiwan’s democratic system and economic significance are a force for global good.
The backdrop to Taiwan’s growing profile as a global flashpoint is China’s ambition to control the island. President Xi Jinping regularly flexes China’s military muscle to demonstrate how that is possible. In response, the U.S. has stepped up military and economic ties with the island.
“The visit of President Tsai is taking place in a very different political environment than in the past,” said Boston College political scientist Robert Ross.
Ms. Tsai won’t be meeting any senior Biden administration officials, according to people involved in the planning. Beijing has already warned that it would take unspecified retaliatory measures if Ms. Tsai meets House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is taking other members of Congress to greet her in California next week.
Keeping in the U.S.’s good graces is critical for Taiwan, which relies on Washington to provide it with military equipment and on the willingness of Americans to support its defense.
China claims the island as its sovereign territory and seeks to control it politically. Strongly opposed to Ms. Tsai’s international travels, Beijing is doing its own counter-marketing, such as permitting her predecessor and political rival, Ma Ying-jeou, to begin the first-ever visit to China by a former president of the island.
In contrast to Ms. Tsai’s careful statements emphasizing how Taiwan’s democracy makes the island different from autocratic China, Mr. Ma declared at the start of his tour that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are all Chinese.
Meanwhile, Chinese diplomats in Washington and New York scheduled press briefings to denounce Ms. Tsai’s visit at times that overlapped with her brief moments of visibility in New York. And tailing her around the city were three buses that ferried demonstrators to wave Chinese flags and shout down Ms. Tsai through loudspeakers at key stops, outnumbering those cheering the president with Taiwanese flags.
On Thursday, the head of Taiwan’s National Security Bureau accused China of mobilizing people to rally outside Ms. Tsai’s hotel for pay. Qian Jin, the deputy consul of China’s consulate in New York, said the demonstrations reflected the true feelings of Chinese people and weren’t organized by the consulate.
“The Chinese community doesn’t want a troublemaker here,” said Mr. Qian, who reiterated Beijing’s view that Ms. Tsai’s presence in the U.S. violates diplomatic agreements, regardless of how much publicity the visit generates.
Ming Chiang, managing director of a U.S.-based promotion organization called Hello Taiwan, said that despite efforts by China’s sympathizers to frustrate the president’s visit, her presence in the U.S. at a pivotal moment helps Taiwan solidify its identity as a sovereign nation, though Ms. Tsai herself doesn’t go so far as voicing such aspirations. “For years the word Taiwan was hardly mentioned,” he said.
Visits by presidents of Taiwan are always carefully managed affairs. Successive U.S. presidential administrations have tried to balance a desire of showing support for Taiwan against the risk of fueling tensions with Beijing. A tripwire for the latter is any sign that the U.S. is upgrading what are supposed to be unofficial relations with Taiwan.
As a result, stops in Washington are never on the itinerary. Instead, Taiwanese presidents, while in the U.S., have made do with phone calls to senior officials, sometimes from their planes sitting on the tarmac.
“The bottom line is that the nature of such transits varies and remains flexible, depending on each U.S. administration and how it views our interest at a particular time, in relation to both Taiwan and Beijing,” said Robert Wang, a retired foreign-service officer who was the No. 2 official at the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto U.S. Embassy.
The tenor of China’s reaction to Ms. Tsai’s U.S. stopover may hinge on which American politicians and business leaders she might meet, as well as how much of that activity is made public. None of Ms. Tsai’s New York activities were scheduled to be available for media coverage, according to a Taiwan government agency in the U.S., the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office.
At a venue overlooking the Hudson River on Wednesday evening, Ms. Tsai was welcomed by hundreds of Taiwanese after shuttling through a side entrance that avoided media and protesters. Inside, she was met by VIPs including New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Laura Rosenberger, who recently left the National Security Council and now chairs the American Institute in Taiwan, which manages relations with the island outside formal diplomatic channels.
On Thursday evening, Ms. Tsai was presented a Global Leadership Award at the Hudson Institute gala. The organization hadn’t publicly announced the event or mentioned her in its invitation, saying the event is private. That is out of step with its practice in past years, when the award was given to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Nikki Haley, who was the Trump administration’s United Nations ambassador.
Another large band of protesters against her visit sang patriotic Chinese songs and held placards stating that Taiwan is part of China.
Biden administration officials have urged Beijing to see Ms. Tsai’s trip as falling in line with past stopovers. Her expected meeting with Mr. McCarthy next week, however, would break new ground as the highest-level political meeting by a Taiwan leader on U.S. soil.
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Beijing has protested previous transits through the U.S. by Taiwanese leaders, and Mr. Xi has signaled that, given China’s current global heft, past arrangements in world affairs should change. “You cannot use a mistake as an excuse for another mistake,” the Chinese Embassy’s chargé d’affaires, Xu Xueyuan, told reporters Wednesday.
China rejects a view from political analysts who say a meeting between Ms. Tsai and Mr. McCarthy in the U.S. would be considered less provocative to Beijing than a House speaker visit to Taiwan—such as that of Nancy Pelosi last August that was followed by live-fire Chinese war maneuvers around the island.
In between her U.S. stopovers, Ms. Tsai will travel to Guatemala and Belize for official summits with two of the 13 nations that maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Meanwhile, stealing the spotlight in Taiwan’s media from both Ms. Tsai’s and Mr. Ma’s visits was the story of an olive baboon, believed to have escaped from a zoo on the island. The baboon was on the loose for over two weeks before authorities shot it with a tranquilizer dart, and its death soon afterward sparked a public outcry.
On Thursday, Taiwan’s official Central News Agency, devoted half its home page to the baboon saga, relegating Ms. Tsai’s New York arrival and Mr. Ma’s China tour to smaller boxes.
“The comparisons to the monkey story have just really taken up all the space on it,” said Lev Nachman, a political scientist who teaches at National Chengchi University in Taipei.
—Charles Hutzler contributed to this article.
Write to James T. Areddy at James.Areddy@wsj.com and Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com