WASHINGTON: US defence minister Lloyd Austin is expected to meet with his Taiwanese counterpart, Admiral Dong Jun, at a big security conference in Singapore next year, the Pentagon announced Friday.
Following a telephone contact in April, the two defence officials may have their first meeting. The US and China have been working to bolster their relationship, which has been mostly thawed since former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial attend to Taiwan in 2022, when China temporarily stopped most of its military-to-military connections.
The Pentagon made the announcement just before the Pentagon announced that Austin do have a medical treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday night and that he would give his lieutenant temporary authority. Austin is undergoing therapy for prostate cancer and is currently dealing with kidney problems that first appeared in December.
After on Friday, the Pentagon reported that Austin had resumed his duties and had come home after the process was successful. According to Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, a senior Pentagon press secretary,” No changes to his official schedule are anticipated at this time, including his participation in scheduled Memorial Day events.”
Austin and Dong, the chancellor of national defense for China, are scheduled to meet at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual gathering of defence ministers and state officials from more than 50 nations, in Singapore on April 24.
The conference also comes, but, as China has engaged in violent military drills around Taiwan, resulting in Taiwan scrambling planes and putting weapon, marine and land products on sensitive Thursday.
China held the exercises after Lai Ching-te, the region’s new president, was inaugurated and delivered a statement urging Beijing to stop its animosity toward the island and accept reality of its existence. Beijing rebuffed his claim, saying it was a call for independence, and ordered the military exercises.
Taiwan is a part of its territory that China claims and promises to annex with force if necessary to obtain integration. Under federal rules, the US is required to make sure the area may defend itself.
In the midst of those exercises, the US has cautioned China not to use Taiwan’s democratic change as a “pretext or reason” for controversial or aggressive measures, a defence official said. The national used the condition of secrecy to disclose information that had not previously been made public.
After President Biden hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in November in California and stressed the need to keep communications open, the two institutions began to interact more.
Dong is a former marine commander who was appointed in late December after his father, Li Shangfu, was removed from office. In April, Dong spoke with Austin by telephone about issues like the conflict in Ukraine, the South China Sea’s freedom of navigation, Taiwan, and North Korea.
Austin last met a Chinese defence secretary in November 2022, when he and Wei Fenghe, next China’s defence minister, were in Cambodia for a local defence secretary meeting.
Since Jim Mattis visited China in 2018, there has n’t been a US defense secretary.
