U.S. says Taiwan president is just passing through. China’s not amused.

President Tsai Ing-wen, center, departing for the United States from Taoyuan International Airport in Taipei, Taiwan, on Wednesday.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — When Lee Teng-hui, then the president of Taiwan, traveled to New York in 1995 to visit his alma mater, Cornell University, it set off a chain of events that became known as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. China, angrily accusing the United States of betraying its own “one-China policy,” carried out months of military drills, including conducting missile tests in the direction of Taiwan.

The United States responded by sailing two aircraft carrier battle groups through the strait to try to bring an end to the crisis.

Now, with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen set to stop in New York on Wednesday on her way to Belize and Guatemala, there are fears of another crisis.

“Because of this low point in U.S.-China relations, both sides are aware of the risks of any misstep, miscalculation or accident that may escalate to more serious military confrontation with grave consequences,” said Jingdong Yuan, a professor focused on China’s defense policy at the University of Sydney.

Hours before Tsai’s departure from Taipei, Beijing threatened retribution if she were to follow through on an expected meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in California while on her return journey through the United States from Central America.

A meeting between the two would be “another provocation that seriously violates the one-China principle, damages China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and undermines peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said at a briefing Wednesday. “We firmly oppose this and will take resolute countermeasures.”

The United States’ “one-China policy” acknowledges but does not explicitly agree with Beijing’s “one-China principle,” which states that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and that the People’s Republic of China is the sole legitimate government. Officially, the United States does not take a position on the status of Taiwan.

Tsai’s trip comes amid heightened tensions across the strait — exacerbated in no small part by a visit to Taiwan last year by McCarthy’s predecessor as speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — and deteriorating relations between the United States and China. Beijing expressed its anger over Pelosi’s visit with aggressive military exercises, including practicing encircling the island.

Though Washington and Taipei have been careful to frame Tsai’s trip as a routine transit — because the United States does not have official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Tsai cannot technically make an official visit — Beijing has characterized a meeting with McCarthy as a provocation that “undermines the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait.”

Lt. Col. Hsiao Yi-chiao, center, and Captain Wu Sheng-wei, left, of the Republic of China, Taiwan, Air Force, in their locker room with their flight ready gear. Chiayi, Taiwan. Dec. 1, 2022. (An Rong Xu for The Washington Post)

Tsai has remained resolute.

“External pressure will not hinder our determination to advance toward the world,” she said Wednesday at Taoyuan airport near Taipei, where her predecessor Ma Ying-jeou, from the conservative Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, had departed for Shanghai just days earlier, becoming the first former Taiwanese president to travel to China.

The Biden administration has tried to play down the visit, noting that Tsai has held meetings with members of Congress during previous transits. “So there’s absolutely no reason for Beijing to use this upcoming transit as an excuse or a pretext to carry out aggressive or coercive activities aimed at Taiwan,” a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday night on the condition of anonymity.

But Beijing’s increasingly assertive stance in the global arena is being felt not just militarily, but diplomatically, too.

The Chinese Communist Party’s global pressure campaign to isolate the island — which it has never ruled but claims sovereignty over — picked up steam over the weekend when Honduras cut its ties with Taipei and switched to recognizing Beijing. That meant the number of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies has shrunk to just 13.

As such, Tsai will head to Belize and Guatemala to try to shore up diplomatic relations with them. Five of the nine countries that have switched allegiances since Tsai took office in 2016 have been in Central America: Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and now Honduras.

Both Guatemala and Paraguay are set to hold elections in the coming months. As Honduran President Xiomara Castro did on the campaign trail, Paraguay’s opposition candidate has pledged to open relations with Beijing if elected, raising the possibility that Taiwan will lose another ally in the region.

Beijing appears to be using all its influence to entice small countries to make the switch, including promising investment and access to its huge market. It has also reportedly offered coronavirus vaccines and other aid to entice Paraguay to change sides.

© Greg Baker/Pool/AP Honduran Foreign Minister Eduardo Enrique Reina Garcia, left, and Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang raise a toast at the weekend following the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Just hours before announcing it would cut ties, Honduras asked Taiwan for about $2.5 billion, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said, describing the request as bribery rather than diplomacy.

After Honduras’s move, the ministry said China was using “flashy but unrealistic” promises to peel away Taiwan’s remaining allies.

Chung Chih-tung, an assistant research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is funded by Taiwan’s government, said Taiwan “has a threshold for friendship bought through money diplomacy.”

“Of course we will do our best to keep out diplomatic relations, but we will also set a threshold if the countries demand too much,” he said.

But as China has whittled away at Taiwan’s international relations — and given the inevitability that more small countries will succumb to the gargantuan grants and investment deals that China offers prospective allies — Taipei has tweaked its approach to diplomacy, analysts say.

It is one that no longer hinges only on formal recognition, now emphasizing Taiwan’s status as both a vibrant democracy and a manufacturer of specialist technology.

As Washington has taken steps to restrict China’s access to computer chips, countries from Germany to Japan have become increasingly aware that their access to advanced semiconductors depends on Taiwan.

And Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought fresh awareness of Taiwan’s position as a democracy living in the shadow of autocracy, leading the international community to draw comparisons between Ukraine and Taiwan, said Kitsch Liao, assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub in Washington.

“The old nightmare scenario was that China fired the first shot and the rest of the world was scrambling to figure out where Taiwan was on the map,” said Liao. Between Pelosi’s visit, China’s rising global influence and Russia’s war in Ukraine, there is now greater recognition of what — and where — Taiwan is.

This growing visibility has made it possible for Taiwan to be more selective in how it allocates resources toward its diplomatic relationships.

“Taiwan provides a critical platform for many political figures from around the world to make a clear public signal about their commitment to shared democratic values and freedoms,” said Wen-Ti Sung, a political scientist at the Australia National University.

Even though they don’t have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, many countries — including the United States — maintain outposts in Taiwan that function as embassies in all but name.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters German Minister of Education and Research Bettina Stark-Watzinger and Jörg Polster, director general of the German Institute Taipei, during a news conference in Taipei, Taiwan last week.

The number of high-level ministerial visits to Taipei, from the likes of Germany and Japan, has also intensified under Tsai’s administration. In the past three months alone, Britain, Switzerland, Finland, Spain, Kosovo, Romania and Lithuania have sent parliamentary delegations — and Germany and the Czech Republic have sent ministers — to Taipei.

Officials have emphasized building ties with “like-minded countries” during Tsai’s second term in office.

“Taiwan now places emphasis on international relations that are more substantive than symbolic,” said Chung, of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research. “Countries that can exert influence when something really happens in the Taiwan Strait are the focus of Taiwan’s current diplomacy.”

That tack might now being paying dividends as China’s threats to Taiwan grow. Although it is Tsai doing the traveling this week — her office suggested she visit McCarthy, rather than him traveling to the island, to avoid antagonizing China in the lead-up to Taiwan’s presidential elections next January — analysts predict that democratic-minded legislators will continue to beat a path to Taipei.

“Mao Zedong used to say, ‘If you haven’t been to the Great Wall, you aren’t a real hero,’” said Sung, the ANU political scientist. “Now the term is, ‘If you haven’t been to Taiwan, you aren’t a real hero.’”

Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.