Good morning. Yesterday, the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, flew out of Taiwan on a US air force passenger jet; today, Taiwan’s defence ministry is under cyber-attack and the Chinese military is surrounding the island and conducting live-fire drills.
That’s the bluntest description of Pelosi’s visit – described by China’s foreign minister Wang Yi today as “manic, irresponsible, extremely irrational” – and the escalation in tensions it has brought. (You can follow the very latest on the live blog.)
As an unprecedented four days of Chinese drills begin, Taiwan’s military says it is “preparing for war without seeking war”. And to many in the region, the visit was a diplomatic misstep with unknowable consequences from the start.
Against that is another view: that Pelosi stood up for democratic freedoms in a region where they are under threat, and sent a necessary message to Beijing that Joe Biden should be communicating more forcefully himself.
Central to which of these interpretations is right is how the coming days and weeks play out in Beijing and Taipei. To understand the stakes better, today’s newsletter is with Helen Davidson, the Guardian’s reporter in Taiwan, and China affairs correspondent Vincent Ni. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Extremism | An insidious “far-right ecosystem” is targeting children in an attempt to radicalise them online, with experts warning that progressively younger school pupils are becoming ensnared in extremist ideologies, a Guardian investigation has found.
Cost of living | The UK’s annual inflation rate could reach as high as 15% by the start of 2023, experts have forecast, as further energy price hikes push up the cost of living. The Bank of England’s interest rates decision is due today.
Archie Battersbee | The parents of 12-year-old Archie Battersbee have pledged to “fight” to get him moved to a hospice, saying they want to choose where he takes “his last moments” after the European court of human rights rejected a last-ditch bid to postpone the withdrawal of life support.
Conservatives | Liz Truss has said an £8.8bn gap in her savings budget caused by abandoning a policy to cut public sector wages was not part of her “central costings” for funding spending pledges. In her first hustings since her rapid U-turn earlier this week, as she suggested the policy had been a “mistake”.
Bristol | Civil rights activist Roy Hackett has died at the age of 93. In 1963 Hackett organised a boycott of the Bristol Omnibus Company because it refused to hire black and Asian people. The campaign forced the bus company to change its policies, and laid the foundations for the Race Relations Act of 1965 and 1968.
In depth: ‘Events can take on their own momentum’
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The “One China” policy
More than 70 years of history lies behind the tensions over Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Ever since the losing side in China’s civil war fled to the island in 1949 and established a government there, Beijing has insisted Taiwan is a breakaway province rather than an independent nation.
Generations of China’s communist leaders have vowed to take it back, but the current president Xi Jinping has given the “Taiwan question” new urgency with a more assertive stance that has led many to conclude a military takeover is more likely than it previously appeared.
The US officially retains a “One China” policy that maintains formal diplomatic ties with China and not Taiwan – and a posture of “strategic ambiguity” over how it would respond to a Chinese attack. In recent months Joe Biden has appeared to promise Taiwan military support if that happens, but the White House insists the US position has not changed.
For more, see this explainer by Helen, or listen to this excellent episode of Today in Focus from last November for a longer view.
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The buildup
Timing is everything in diplomacy. If Pelosi had made her trip to Taiwan in April, when it was first scheduled, it probably would have generated less heat, Vincent says. But Pelosi got Covid, and cancelled.
This week, there’s a different context: “China’s People’s Liberation Army was celebrating its 95th founding anniversary, speculation over Xi Jinping’s third term is rife, the Chinese Communist party’s summer retreat is supposedly going on, and there’s a slowing economy that has left many unable to find a job.”
That means the visit is embarrassing for Xi and presents a challenge to which Beijing feels compelled to respond – perhaps as well as an opportunity to distract from internal economic difficulties.
In Taiwan, there was relatively little coverage of the impending trip until recently: London School of Economics researcher Mariah Thornton pointed out that it had featured 24 minutes into a primetime evening news bulletin at the weekend. (In this piece, Taipei-based journalist Brian Hioe reflects a common refrain in Taiwan: “For now at least, life carries on as usual.”)
“People here have been more focused on elections, the heatwave, they’re not that bothered by Chinese threats because they’ve been coming for so long,” Helen said. “But once it was confirmed Pelosi was on the way, that really switched things up.”
At one point on Tuesday, the FlightRadar site briefly went offline as more than 700,000 people used it to follow Pelosi’s plane – making it the most tracked flight of all time.
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The reception in Taiwan
Helen went to the airport and found a couple of hundred people awaiting the US delegation’s arrival, including a quickly organised demonstration of support; at Pelosi’s hotel later, there were “maybe 1,000 people, most of them supporters, but an anti-Pelosi crowd too, chanting things like ‘Yankee go home’.”
In general, Helen adds, “there is a lot of nuance in the discussion here. People are generally very supportive because it keeps them front of mind for the world, they feel it offers a layer of protection. But on the flip side, there’s a feeling that the execution of this trip has caused a lot of problems.”
Joe Biden said last month that a visit was “not a good idea right now”, and the White House has sought to emphasise that the trip does not signal a change in the US stance – but many Republicans in the US have supported it, and whatever Biden says, it does appear to chime with the shifts that many detect in his informal statements, if not in official policy.
“There’s a feeling it ratcheted things up a bit,” said Helen. “That the escalation in general has been on the Chinese side, but this hasn’t helped.”
Despite all that, once the plan for the trip leaked, there was a consensus view among those Helen spoke to with government connections that it had to go ahead. “They said their real fear was that if the US backed out, what message did that send about the support they were willing to give?”
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The reception in the region
“Many countries feel worried and upset,” says Vincent. “There is a concern about anything that could jeopardise the prosperity of the world’s most populous region. They ask whether this was the right way to show solidarity.”
Ben Bland, director of the Asia-Pacific programme at London-based thinktank Chatham House, told Vincent that many governments in Asia “are concerned about Beijing’s increasingly assertive behaviour … But, at the same time, they fear that the stridency of the response across different parts of the US political system risks further provoking China.”
One striking example of this was the response of Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, who on Wednesday said that “all parties” – not just China – “should consider how they best contribute to de-escalating the current tensions”.
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How China is responding
The statecraft of Pelosi’s trip to Taipei has now given way to much rawer expressions of power: live-fire drills by the Chinese military, with five coastal areas around Taiwan – including some that go deep into Taiwan’s claimed waters – occupied in naval exercises. China has ordered all boats and aircraft to avoid these areas for three days – a direct challenge to the US and Taiwanese presence in the region.
Two unidentified aircraft, believed to be US military, have meanwhile appeared on flight trackers around Taiwan, Helen reports this morning. One has been flying in proximity to a Chinese exercise zone.
“China will do everything they can to do this aggressively without accidentally triggering a response,” said Vincent. “But this is in theory. In reality, if something goes wrong, events can take on their own momentum.”
While a military assault can never be ruled out, Vincent argues that China has “much more room to manoeuvre on ‘grey zone tactics’”, like the cyber-attacks underway this morning. And Beijing – Taiwan’s most important trading partner – has announced a sudden ban on a range of food imports.
The range of options deployed by China is some indication of how significant Pelosi’s visit has been. “It has rattled the dynamic that was in place, and we are still waiting to see how this crisis is to end,” Vincent said. “The region is in a state of uncertainty.”
What else we’ve been reading
Whether due to Covid-19 or the astronomical price of getting hitched, more people are marrying in secret. Leah Harper spoke to couples about their clandestine weddings and why it was right for them. Nimo
The UK is very angry, particularly towards people working in jobs where they have to deal with the public – and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Amy Fleming tours the national fury and offers some solutions. Archie
In this uplifting interview, Lyndsey Winship spoke with Alan Cumming about his new one-man show Burn, based on the life of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Cumming talks about his relationship with dance now that he’s older and how he really wants to have fun in everything he does. Nimo
The story of how Warner Bros pulled the plug on Batgirl for a tax break is appalling and thoroughly entertaining. Peter Bradshaw writes that this is what happens went you treat movies as “a Gazprom pipeline of superhero mush”, while Stuart Heritage has an enjoyable list of other movies to meet the same dismal fate. Archie
George Monbiot argues that the low traffic neighbourhood scheme is a force for social good: the air is cleaner, communities are connecting with each other and there are fewer road accidents. So why are some people responding to it with violence and vandalism? Nimo
Sport
Commonwealth Games | Scotland’s Eilish McColgan won the first major title of career with an epic 10,000m triumph at the Commonwealth Games. England’s Katarina Johnson-Thompson retained her heptathlon crown and dedicated victory to her grandmother, who died last week.
Football | Premier League players will no longer take the knee before every match, preferring to perform the anti-racism gesture at a selection of high profile matches.
Cricket | Defending champions Southern Brave won a comfortable victory over Welsh Fire in the first match of the second season of the Hundred. Brave captain James Vince top-scored with 71.
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The front pages
The Guardian print edition leads today with “Revealed: the far-right web radicalising UK children”. Roy Hackett is remembered with a front-page portrait. “Hosepipe ban for millions as country faces drought” – that’s the Times. The Telegraph has “Water plant that could prevent hose ban ‘secretly mothballed’”, the plant in question being a Thames Water desalination unit. “It’s drought of order … Grass up a neighbour” – the Metro reports there will be a “snoop hotline” to report those who flout the ban. The Express has the drought in a puff box while its lead is “Fears soaring gas bills will push inflation to 15%”. “Ditch the woke ‘witch trials,’” Suella Braverman, the attorney general, rails in the Daily Mail against the “diversity industry” and equality training, among other things. “End betrayal of our kids” –that’s “Peaty’s Tory blast” in the Mirror which quotes the swimming hero demanding investment in sports facilities. “My Jamie’s Wagatha death threats” – the Sun runs another Rebekah Vardy splash. And today’s lead story in the Financial Times is “Softbank approaches end of an era with steps to reduce Alibaba stake”.
Today in Focus
The rehabilitation of Mohammed bin Salman
Middle East correspondent Martin Chulov discusses how the Saudi crown prince has been re-embraced on the world stage, four years after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi
Cartoon of the day | Steve Bell
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Chemical intensive farming has led to huge biodiversity loss. The justification has often been that destroying land and using fertilisers is simply the most efficient way to maximise yields. However, a decade-long project by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology found that nature-friendly farming practices don’t reduce the amount of crops that are grown at all. In fact scientists found that boosting biodiversity and reintroducing wildlife are essential for agricultural production.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
