China upset Harris met with vice president of Taiwan
By Ryan King
January 28, 2022
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian rebuked Harris’s announcement that she had a brief encounter with her counterpart Lai while attending the inauguration of Honduras’s new president, Xiomara Castro, on Thursday.
“There is no Taiwanese ‘vice president’ since Taiwan is a province of China. China always opposes all forms of official exchanges between the US and Taiwan,” Lijan said during a press conference Friday. “The US should abide by the one-China principle and stipulations in the three China-US joint communiques, take China’s position and concerns seriously, stop all forms of official interactions with Taiwan”
Harris told reporters that she discussed the “common interest” between the United States and Taiwan in the region and the Biden administration’s “root causes strategy,” which seeks to address the underlying factors in migrants fleeing parts of Central America to the U.S. by addressing economic and political problems in the region.
“The brief conversation that we had was really about a common interest in this part of the region and apparently Taiwan’s interest in our root causes strategy,” she said.
