ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (AP) — President Donald Trump on Friday indicated that he may still speak with Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te — even after China has publicly urged him not to directly engage with the leader of the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own.Trump first raised the idea last month on his way back from meeting President Xi Jinping in Beijing, saying that he intended to speak directly with Lai as he weighs whether to go ahead with a $14 billion arms sale for Taipei that Congress approved earlier this year.The U.S. president on Friday suggested that a call with the Taiwanese leader is still in play. “I’ll always talk to him,” Trump told reporters when asked if he still intended on calling Lai.Such a call would mark the first direct dialogue between sitting American and Taiwanese presidents in many decades, and Beijing has discouraged Trump against such an engagement.
The Chinese embassy in Washington in a statement to the Associated Press this week said that kind of phone call could undermine progress in the delicate U.S.-China relationship and urged the Republican administration to “handle the Taiwan question with utmost prudence” and “avoid sending wrong signals” to officials in the democratically run island that China views as a breakaway province.
