Experts denounce US decision to sell arms to Taiwan as interference in China's affairs

The US State Department's recent approval of a plan to sell weapons worth about US$2.22 billion to Taiwan has attracted worldwide attention, with some experts saying the US move interferes in China's internal affairs and severely violates the one-China principle.

It remains a convenient tool for unreconstructed Cold Warriors to keep the tensions alive between the United States and China, said William Jones, Washington bureau chief of the US publication Executive Intelligence Review.

At this point, one might also suspect that the moves are part of an agenda of the neo-conservative hard-liners in the US administration to take the edge off the recent relatively successful meeting between the two presidents in Osaka and to keep relations as icy as possible, Jones added.

Last year, there was a so-called normalization of US military-technical cooperation with Taiwan, when the United States began to routinely approve such transactions, ignoring the protests from China, said Vasily Kashin, head of the Department of International Military-Political and Military-Economic Issues of the National Research University-Higher School of Economics.

The exacerbation of the Taiwan issue can seriously damage the stability in the region, Kashin added.

US arms sales to Taiwan muscle in on China's internal affairs, seriously breach the one-China principle that the United States has repeatedly asserted, and break the basic rules of international laws and relations, said Ronnie Lins, director of the China-Brazil Center for Research and Business.

Taiwan is an inseparable part of China, and if the United States plays sneaky tricks on the Taiwan issue, it is doomed to failure, Lins said.

The massive new arms sales to Taiwan "is a move that could clearly flare up tensions" in Asia, said Hasim Turker, a senior researcher at the Ankara-based think tank Bosphorus Center for Asian Studies.

China has clearly stated that the Taiwan issue concerns its core interests, and despite this fact, the Trump administration has crossed the line here, said Turker.

The US arms sales to Taiwan is once again a serious provocation against China, said Ling Xingguang, a professor emeritus at the Fukui Prefectural University in Japan, adding that the US move will seriously affect China-US relations, and that China as well as peace-lovers from across the world should make their voices heard and protest against the US move.