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Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
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Oriana Skylar Mastro, Emily Young Carr, Michael Mazza

Biden Will Speak Softer but Act Stronger on Taiwan

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen gestures in front of the Presidential Office in Taipei on Oct. 10. Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images

Last week, the world was waiting to see whether U.S. President Donald Trump would be reelected. Four days later, the verdict was in. Joe Biden, winning more overall votes than any other candidate in U.S. history, will be the 46th president of the United States.

While the United States was fixated on the final days of campaigning, China didn’t miss a beat in its aggression toward Taiwan. The day before the U.S. presidential election, Chinese aircraft flew into Taiwan’s airspace eight separate times. These military maneuvers are part of a disturbing trend of increased Chinese military activity over the past two months. Since Sept. 9, Beijing has flown near-constant sorties into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ), sometimes conducting as many as 30 in a day. On Sept. 21, China claimed that the median line, the boundary between the airspace of Taiwan and China that both sides had generally respected for decades, no longer existed.

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