from a historic visit by the house speaker nancy pelosi prompting threats of fierce retaliation out of beijing. good morning. it is tuesday. dana has the day off today. i m bill hemmer. welcome back, sandra. good morning. glad to be with you. i m sandra smith. this is america s newsroom. those chinese fighter jets buzzing taiwan airspace amid local reporting now the speaker could be arriving there in a matter of hours. bill: she would be the highest ranking u.s. official to be in that island in 25 years. china sees it as a slap in the face saying the u.s. should not support a country that beijing views as a breakaway province. the white house has not confirmed her trip but maintains it will not be intimidated. here is what nfc spokesperson john kirby said just this morning. we gave her advice and counsel and gave her information and we re helping with her transportation. this is her decision and we support and respect that decision. what we have said is there is no
that s very tame like the one china policy is still in force that may calm china down. if she says something of concern to taiwan s future, which i hope she does. that demands a chinese sponsor they will look like what they used to call us, sandra. they used to call us a paper tiger. china will look like a paper tiger if it doesn t do anything. sandra: she is expected to land in the next 30 minutes or so. real quick i want to put up on the screen, because we have now received this official video coming into us of taiwan s tallest building. the most iconic landmark. taiwan 101 welcoming the speaker s visit to taiwan. quick reaction, michael. the important thing is taiwan wants to be recognized as a country and want this to be an official visit and want to put up their flag and say we are the republic of china on taiwan. american executive branch policy has been to deny taiwan
one-china policy. let s talk about the fallout from the president-elect s phone call with the leader of taiwan. bringing in professor of chinese politics at kings college in london and director of the lao china institute live via skype from england. good to have you with us, kerry. first of all, i want to get your thoughts. this is a big deal, this is a shift in protocol after many decades. what were your thoughts when you heard that this happened? well, i think it s indicative of the surprises we probably got in store with mr. trump. and i think in beijing the government of the people s republic were expecting surprises. he s a businessman, not a politician. i think that they knew there were going to be unexpected things. this is on their list probably the least that they wanted and the most inflammatory. as you said, since 1979, no american president or president-elect has had direct contact with the president of the republic of china on taiwan. and so this is a very, very big
this is nothing to do with technicality. this is raw power and politics. it is unclear at this pint that administration has understood that. that s why i think you have to come back to the question of consequences. what i would do right now, would be to pull our ambassador back from beijing and put a freeze on daily diplomatic activity, number one. number two, i would hit china where it would hurt them to make it clear how unhappy they were. i would lift all travel restrictions on officials of the government of the republic of china on taiwan. the separate government that fled there when the communists took power in 1949. i think we should do that anyway and i think it would send beijing up the wall. p. that s the signal they need to see, or something like it. and if russia sees we are prepared to do that with respect to china, maybe they will yet come to their senses. that was, with all due
bottomless pig ignorance and recklessness of donald trump s phone call with the president of taiwan. joining us now is james fellows, national correspondent for the atlantic. you have more room here than a tweet, james, to react to everything we now know about the taiwan call many. so i think it s worth saying there are two possibilities here. each of them is bad. one possibility is that donald trump did not understand the significance of what he was doing. he didn t understand the sense of time of richard nixon, gerald ford, jimmy carter for whom i worked and then through the democratic and republican presidents alike, there s been a carefully negotiated protocol of how we deal with the separate entities of the republic of china on taiwan and china on the main land. we essentially say they are one country. presidents of the united states