China engaged in ‘border war’ with India: Senator Cornyn
CHINA is engaged in a ‘border war’ with India and posing a grave threat to its neighbors, senior US lawmaker John Cornyn has told the country’s senate, citing details of his recent visit to New Delhi and Southeast Asia along with congressional colleagues to understand the challenges that the countries in the region are facing from China.
The Republican senator from Texas, who is also a co-chair of the India Caucus in the senate, told the upper chamber, ‘The most urgent and grave threats are against countries closer to China’s borders. Last week, I had the chance to lead a congressional delegation visiting Southeast Asia to gain a better understanding of the threats and challenges in the region. It (China) threatens freedom of navigation in international waters, and it’s guilty of gross human rights abuses against its own people, namely the Muslim minority Uyghurs.
‘It’s engaged in a border war with India and it threatens to invade the Republic of China, otherwise known as Taiwan,’ he added.
Cornyn said they travelled to India where they ‘met with Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi and Cabinet officials to discuss threats posed by China as well as other shared priorities’.
A border standoff between the Indian and Chinese troops erupted on May 5 last year following a violent clash in the Pangong Lake areas and both sides gradually enhanced their military deployment. A series of military and diplomatic talks have taken place between the two nuclear-armed neighbors but while they completed the disengagement process in the Gogra area in August and in the north and south banks of the Pangong Lake in February, the two nations failed to make any headway at their 13th round of military talks held on October 10 in resolving the standoff in the remaining friction points in the eastern Ladakh region.
Cornyn said that during the visit, ‘one of the main topics was the timetable for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan’.
‘In every way possible, Taiwan is a stark contrast to the People’s Republic of China. It’s a true democracy, with elections whose results are not predetermined. It’s a free-market economy that adheres to the rule of law, and it shares the same basic values we embrace in the United States - freedom of speech, freedom of press, religion, and assembly,’ he said.
Last week, US president Joe Biden had a virtual summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in which the latter warned that encouraging Taiwanese independence would be ‘playing with fire’.