WASHINGTON: Taiwan\u2019s President Lai Ching-te said Thursday he would be \u201chappy\u201d to talk to US leader Donald Trump \u2014 a conversation that would break more than four decades of diplomatic protocol and risk angering China.<\/p>\n
Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he would speak to Lai, as the White House weighs arms sales to the democratic island.<\/p>\n
It was the second time since a summit in Beijing last week that Trump has said he would call the Taiwanese leader.<\/p>\n
Such communication would be the first time since Washington switched diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 that serving presidents of Taiwan and the United States would speak to each other.<\/p>\n
Lai said Taiwan was \u201ccommitted to maintaining the stable status quo in the Taiwan Strait\u201d and that \u201cChina is the disruptor of peace and stability,\u201d the foreign ministry said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Lai would be \u201chappy to discuss these matters with President Trump,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll speak to him. I speak to everybody,\u201d Trump said, adding that he had a great meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping during his state visit to Beijing last week.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll work on that, the Taiwan problem,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
After wrapping up his trip to Beijing, Trump suggested arms sales to Taiwan could be used as a bargaining chip with China, which claims the island is part of its territory and has threatened to seize it by force.<\/p>\n
Since then, Lai\u2019s government has been on the offensive, insisting that US policy on Taiwan has not changed and that Trump made no commitments to China on arms sales to the island.<\/p>\n
Taiwan relies heavily on US support to deter any potential Chinese attack, and has been under intense pressure to increase its spending through investment in American firms.<\/p>\n
In 2016, shortly after his first election victory, president-elect Trump accepted a phone call from then Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, angering Beijing and stunning diplomats, world leaders and China watchers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: Taiwan\u2019s President Lai Ching-te said Thursday he would be \u201chappy\u201d to talk to US leader Donald Trump \u2014 a conversation that would break more than four decades of diplomatic protocol and risk angering China. Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he would speak to Lai, as the White House weighs arms sales to the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":98080,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98082,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98061\/revisions\/98082"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}