#HHS Secretary Alex Azar to travel to Taiwan, angering China

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Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar
Evan Vucci/AP

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar will travel to Taiwan in coming days to discuss the global response to the coronavirus pandemic, the highest level visit by a US official to the country in more than 40 years.

Azar will lead a delegation with the aim of strengthening ties between the US and Taiwan as the relationship between Washington and Beijing continues to deteriorate.

“Taiwan has been a model of transparency and cooperation in global health during the COVID-19 pandemic and long before it,” Azar said in a statement.

“This trip represents an opportunity to strengthen our economic and public health cooperation with Taiwan, especially as the United States and other countries work to strengthen and diversify our sources for crucial medical products,” he continued.

On behalf of President Trump, Azar will meet with COVID-19 experts and responders, senior counterparts in Taiwan and will also deliver a speech to public health graduate students, the department said.

The visit is also being billed as an opportunity to highlight Taiwan’s “remarkable success battling COVID-19 as a free and transparent democratic society” — a thinly-veiled attack on the Chinese Communist Party, which has been blasted by the president for covering up the earliest cases of the virus in Wuhan late last year.

The announcement rankled officials in China who objected to the visit.

Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said they were “firmly opposed to official interactions between the US and Taiwan.”

Taiwan is a self-governing island nation and important US ally in the Pacific region but the Communist Party in China contests Taiwan’s sovereign status.

Wenbin on Wednesday urged the US to adhere to the “one China principle,” which rules that Taiwan and mainland China are part of a single country.

But escalating tensions between Beijing and Washington in recent years has seen the Trump administration strengthening its ties with officials in Taiwan.

China’s Communist government has found itself increasingly isolated by its neighbors, too, with Russia last month accusing an arctic scientist of spying for Beijing and Kazakhstan in October convicting a Chinese spy with espionage, according to a Bloomberg News report.