The United States is recording the active movement of Chinese warships around Taiwan, but has not talked about the inevitability of an attack by Chinese forces on the island, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said.
The situation around Taiwan escalated in early August last year after US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island at the time. China, which considers the island one of its provinces, condemned the visit as US support for Taiwan separatism and staged large-scale military exercises.
Official relations between the PRC and its island province were severed in 1949 after Kuomintang forces led by Chiang Kai-shek moved to Taiwan after losing a civil war with the Communist Party of China.
Business and informal contacts between the island and mainland China resumed in the late 1980s. From the early 1990s, the parties began to consult through non-governmental organizations – the Beijing Association for Development of Relations Across the Taiwan Strait and the Taipei Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation.
