Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met last week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.
Beijing denounced the meeting as a provocative violation of the "One China" policy. Taipei responded with “Neither Taiwan nor its friends in the U.S. will back down,” and Washington played it down as something neither uncommon nor official.
My initial observations were that each of the three players, the U.S., China and Taiwan, seem to have acted rationally in a familiar chord with three different tones.