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US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going to visit Taiwan, with scheduled meetings with government officials at the self-governed island that China threatens to forcefully overtake, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Nancy Pelosi, who is second in line to the Oval Office after the US vice president, is also expected to hold a meeting with other high-ranking officials while in Taiwan on Tuesday and is scheduled to leave the island a day later.
"She's definitely coming," the people whom Pelosi is planning to meet with in Taiwan have informed WSJ of her arrival. "The only variable is whether she spends the night in Taipei."
In a statement that was released on July 31, Nancy Pelosi's office said the US House speaker is leading a Congressional delegation to the Indo-Pacific region, including visits to Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. However, there was no mention of Taiwan which China regards as its own.
Despite no reference to the visit to the self-ruled island that is facing a security threat from China, Nancy Pelosi's plane which departed for the Asia tour on Sunday, has become the most tracked flight on FlightRadar24.
Since the reports of the US House speaker's visit were released last month, Beijing has been warning of Nancy's Taiwan visit, saying that it will act strongly and take countermeasures if the US side insists on going ahead with the visit.
In a press briefing last month, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Pelosi's Taiwan visit will have a severe negative impact on the political foundation of China-US relations.
Even US President Joe Biden had said the US military believes it is not a "good idea" for House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to travel to Taiwan as planned. "The military thinks it's not a good idea right now," Biden was quoted as saying by the White House press pool.
China has on many occasions firmly opposed any form of official interaction between the United States and the Taiwan region.
While warning against the US House speaker's Taiwan visit, a Chinese State media outlet said visiting Taiwan is definitely a red line that Pelosi must never cross.
In a phone call between the US and Chinese presidents last week, Xi Jinping told Biden that China would safeguard national sovereignty and said those who play with fire will perish by it.
Biden, meanwhile, told the Chinese president that US policy on Taiwan hasn't changed and that Washington opposes unilateral changes to the status quo.