China Is Stuffing Congressional Inbox with Taiwan Hate Mail

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Hope everyone is having a better week than the Boston hotel-goer whose room was raided by FBI and Army special forces teams. Turns out they had the wrong room number.

(The FBI has a tough job, but it’s not as tough as spotting a Finnish sniper.)

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: China is spamming Congress’s inboxes with Taiwan hate mail, Ukraine is getting heavy guns to knock out Iranian drones, and things are getting steamy at the Finnish Embassy in Washington as it joins the NATO club.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s nearly weeklong “transit” of the Americas, with stops in New York, Belize, Guatemala, and Los Angeles, is nearly over, with the Taiwanese leader getting a sendoff at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Thursday afternoon from a bipartisan delegation led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

But while the event left even Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, with rarely spoken warm words for the current head of the House, Tsai’s visit underscored the state of the U.S.-China diplomatic relationship that has few—if any—guardrails left.

Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last year set off more than a week of Chinese military drills over Taiwan that included vessels surrounding the island and ballistic missile launches, and now China is seeing almost any embrace of Taiwan as a provocation, especially as the tough talk ramps up in Washington.

Symbol-minded. After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s triumphal visit to Washington in December, Tsai’s trip was also seen in Washington as an effort to embrace an embattled democracy that the United States does not officially recognize but has been growing ever closer.

And it’s a trend that has spooked China. As more than 20 members of Congress prepared to leave for the trip to the Reagan Library this week, they began receiving threatening emails from Chinese diplomats in Washington, urging them not to go, according to emails obtained by Foreign Policy. Those messages, which have become standard practice in the past several years, are increasing in tempo—and getting nastier in tone. Punchbowl News first reported on the letters.

“We get hate mail from them all the time,” said one House aide familiar with the trip, adding that the newly created House Select Committee on China’s hearings on military threats from China and the repression of Uyghur Muslims had sparked a flood of angry emails. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the threatening missives.

“It’s an effort to intimidate people and then make people second-guess themselves. It’s like classic gaslighting.”

No room for compromise. Though congressional aides have seen versions of the same copy-and-pasted spiel from the Chinese Embassy in Washington over the years—the foreign-policy equivalent of a pesky spam email—the notes sent to members of Congress this time, especially to an eight-person bipartisan delegation traveling to Taiwan led by House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul, are notable.

For the first time, Chinese officials warned in the emails about Pelosi’s visit ratcheting up tensions with Washington and appeared to make veiled threats that their publicly announced plans for a peaceful reunification with Taiwan could be threatened.

“Former Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last year triggered a serious crisis in the China-U.S. relationship, and the lessons should be learned,” said one letter sent by Chinese officials to a Republican member of Congress traveling to Taiwan. “People in Taiwan are also deeply concerned about the situation in the Taiwan Strait, and do not want the peace in the Taiwan Strait to be destroyed by the selfish interests of individual politicians.”

“China has no room for compromise on this issue,” the note continued. “We urge the US side to refrain from organizing [congressional delegations] to visit Taiwan, and stop all forms of official interaction with Taiwan. We urge the US side not to support ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces, not to fudge and hollow out the one-China principle, so as to avoid furthering the tension across the strait.”

California dreaming. But members of Congress are trying to show they’re not intimidated. “The Chinese Communist Party must never be given a veto on who America’s elected representatives meet with,” Rep. Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on China, who traveled to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to meet Tsai, said in an emailed statement. “By meeting with President Tsai, our bipartisan delegation, led by Speaker McCarthy, is standing up to the bullies in the [Chinese Communist Party]. We will not be intimidated.”

When asked for comment on the matter, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said: “This is a serious violation of the one-China principle and the provisions of the three China-US joint communiqués. It seriously infringes upon China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. China has launched solemn demarches to the US side, urging it to stop using Taiwan to contain China and not to go further down a wrong and dangerous path.”

Gallagher and the China committee’s ranking member, Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, are leading a delegation of 10 members of Congress that is splitting off from McCarthy’s delegation and heading to Hollywood and Silicon Valley to deal with Chinese influence on the silver screen and in tech. On Wednesday, Gallagher, Krishnamoorthi, and other members met with Disney CEO Robert Iger, screenwriters, and studio execs.

And they’re set for meetings with jet-setting Silicon Valley power brokers today and tomorrow, including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft Vice Chairman Brad Smith.

“If Hollywood has been the engine of American soft power and a key spreader of our values and ideals for the past century, we don’t love the fact that it’s now being utilized by China in pushing their agenda,” said the House aide.

Richard Verma was sworn in as Biden’s new deputy secretary of state for management and resources.

At the Institute for the Study of War think tank, Jennifer Cafarella was named director of strategic initiatives.

Cindy McCain has officially taken over as head of the United Nations World Food Programme.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has tapped Apple’s vice president for worldwide education, health, and government, Doug Beck, to be the next head of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Welcome to the club. Finland officially joined NATO this week, ending a nearly yearlong diplomatic process that involved plenty of headaches, ups and downs, and slow-walking from NATO allies Turkey and Hungary.

Finland’s NATO accession doubles the alliance’s direct border with Russia and adds one of Europe’s most advanced and capable militaries to the NATO arsenal. On the geopolitics side, it bottles up Russia’s ability to project power in the Baltic Sea and offers new military lifelines to the vulnerable Baltic States in the alliance.

There’s a missing piece in this NATO expansion package, however: Sweden. Turkey (and Hungary) continues to stall Sweden’s accession to NATO, despite efforts by Stockholm and Helsinki and basically everyone else in NATO to bring them into the alliance together.

Fun fact: Finland joined NATO on the alliance’s 74th birthday, and as celebration, officials in Brussels are bringing back Bing Crosby’s oft-heard “NATO Song.” It’s a real thing, we swear.

Let’s get technical. As part of a major new arms package for Ukraine, Washington is sending nine “gun trucks” mounted with 30-millimeter guns to shoot Russian and Iranian drones out of the sky, as Task & Purpose reports. The new arms shipment highlights Russia’s growing tactic of using cheap drones, many made in Iran, to attack Ukrainian civilian and military targets as its own military offensives falter.

Higher tensions in higher ed. Back in the day, U.S. academics happily poured investments and resources into expanding cooperation with Chinese universities and educational exchange programs. That all may be coming to an end, as accusations and investigations of China stealing sensitive American tech and research under the guise of academic exchanges pile up, and Washington’s sharp hawkish turn against Beijing poisons the well of U.S.-China academic relationships.

As our colleagues Christina Lu and Rocio Fabbro report, despite the headwinds, some prominent U.S. scholars are still pushing for closer collaboration with China, even if it means navigating a political minefield.

An Israeli drone releases riot control grenades during clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces along the Gaza-Israel border east of Gaza City on March 30.Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images

Gettin’ steamy. Finland joined NATO this week, offering a perfect chance to examine how Finland uses saunas in diplomacy, Robbie reports. The history of sauna diplomacy involves repurposed Israeli telephone poles in the Sinai Peninsula, the Namibian independence movement, George H.W. Bush jumping naked into the Baltic Sea, and Robbie sipping gin drinks in the Finnish Embassy’s own sauna. Read on here.

Today: Chinese leader Xi Jinping, French President Emmanuel Macron, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are set for a trilateral meeting in Beijing. Also meeting: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visits Turkey.

Tuesday, April 11: Macron is off to the Netherlands, while U.S. President Joe Biden visits Northern Ireland.

“If she wants to give an account of her actions, she can do so in the Hague.”

—The United Kingdom’s mission to the U.N. in a statement on Maria Lvova-Belova, a top Russian official, after the Hague-based International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for her over her role in war crimes in Ukraine. Lvova-Belova virtually briefed the U.N. at Russia’s request about Russia “protecting” Ukrainian children by forcibly removing them from the country. Many Western diplomats boycotted the meeting. The forcible removal of children from a country is considered an act of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Not retreating, just advancing in a different direction. When the 395 interstate between D.C. and Virgnia turned into an epic traffic jam after a crash on April 2, a group of savvy drivers executed a coordinated, orderly withdrawal down an on-ramp from the Pentagon. Hats off to the Pentagon police force that helped coordinate it so at least a few of the cars could escape the quagmire.

Paddington junta. With news breaking that the latest installment in the Paddington Bear film franchise will take place in the bear’s native Peru, the internet is already in cackles writing new fan fiction.

“From 1991-1994, Paddington Bear was Subcomandante of Fujimori’s brutal Groupo Colina. Known as El Oso del Diablo, Paddington oversaw the execution of hundreds of trade unionists and other political dissidents,” wrote one Twitter user. Not the lovable teddy bear we thought, eh?

Unclear at press time whether Paddington’s junta, which ought to fight in mackintoshes and old hats, had the logistics capacity to bring the truckloads of marmalade needed to feed his army.

Update, April 7, 2023: This article was updated to include comment from a Chinese embassy spokesperson.