WASHINGTON -- China cut off contacts with the United States on vital issues Friday -- including military matters and crucial climate cooperation -- as concerns rose that the Communist government's hostile reaction to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit could signal a lasting, more aggressive approach toward its U.S. rival and the self-ruled island.
China's move to freeze key lines of communication compounded the worsening of relations from Pelosi's visit and from the Chinese response with military exercises off Taiwan, including firing missiles that splashed down in surrounding waters.
After the White House summoned China's ambassador, Qin Gang, late Thursday to protest the military exercises, White House spokesman John Kirby on Friday condemned the decision to end important dialogue with the United States as "irresponsible."
Qin charged in a column published in The Washington Post that Pelosi's visit to Taiwan was a willfully provocative act. He noted that it included "full-protocol treatment" by authorities of Taiwan's governing Democratic Progressive Party, "who make no secret of pursuing independence in their party platform." He said Pelosi's visit thus violated a long-standing U.S. commitment not to develop official relations with Taiwan.
The White House spokesman blasted China's "provocative" actions since Pelosi's trip to Taiwan, which China claims as part of its territory. But Kirby noted that some channels of communication remain open between military officials in the two countries. He repeated daily assurances that the U.S. had not changed its policy toward the Communist mainland and the self-ruled island.
"Bottom line is we're going to continue our efforts to keep opening lines of communication that are protecting our interests and our values," Kirby said. He declined to speak about any damage to long-term relations between China and the United States, calling that a discussion for later.
Taiwan has put its military on alert and staged civil defense drills, but the overall mood remained calm Friday. Flights have been canceled or diverted and fishermen have remained in port to avoid the Chinese drills.
On the Chinese coast across from Taiwan, tourists gathered to try to catch a glimpse of military aircraft.
A minister at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Jing Quan, told reporters that Pelosi's mission of support for the democratic government of Taiwan has had "a severe impact on the political foundation of China-U.S. relations, seriously infringed upon China's sovereignty and [territorial] integrity and ... undermines peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits."
Long-term, a significantly more confrontational relationship between China and the U.S. threatens an equilibrium under which Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping's governments have sparred on human rights, trade, competition and countless other issues but avoided direct conflict and maintained occasional top-level contacts toward other matters, including cutting climate-damaging emissions.
A joint U.S.-China deal to fight climate change struck by Xi and then-President Barack Obama in November 2014 is credited as a turning point that led to the 2015 Paris agreement in which nearly every nation in the world pledged to try to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases. Seven years later during climate talks in Glasgow, another U.S.-China deal helped smooth over bumps to another international climate deal.
China and the United States are the world's No. 1 and No. 2 climate polluters, together producing nearly 40% of all fossil-fuel emissions.
Ominously, experts in China-U.S. relations warned that China's diplomatic and military moves appeared to go beyond retaliatory measures for the visit and could open a new, more openly hostile era, and a more uncertain time for Taiwan's democratic government.
China-U.S. relations are "in a downward spiral," said Bonnie Glaser, head of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund.
"And I think that China is likely to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait in ways that are going to be harmful to Taiwan and are going to be disadvantageous to the United States," Glaser said.
In recent years, other rounds of tensions between China and its neighbors over the India border, regional islands and the South China Sea have ended with China asserting new territorial claims and enforcing them, noted John Culver, a former East Asia national intelligence officer, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
The same could happen now over Taiwan, Culver said. "So I don't know how this ends. We've seen how it begins."
CHINA'S MOVES
China's measures this week are the latest steps intended to punish the U.S. for allowing the visit to the island it claims as its own territory, to be annexed by force if necessary. China on Thursday launched threatening military exercises just off Taiwan's coasts, running through Sunday.
Some missiles were sent flying over Taiwan itself, Chinese officials told state media -- a significant increase in China's menacing of the island.
China routinely complains when Taiwan has direct contacts with foreign governments, but its response to the Pelosi visit -- she was the highest-ranking American official to visit in 25 years -- has been unusually strong.
It appears to derail a rare encouraging note -- high-level in-person meetings between top officials in recent months including the defense chiefs at an Asia security conference in Singapore and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a Group of 20 meeting in Indonesia.
Those talks were viewed as steps in a positive direction in an otherwise poisoned relationship. Now, talks have been suspended even on climate, where the two countries' envoys had met multiple times.
Glaser said it's critical that the two sides have private conversations to prevent the dispute from erupting further.
"At this juncture, what is needed urgently is more candid, closed-door dialogue between the United States and China to understand each other's intentions and manage risk," Glaser said. "Beijing's decision to suspend and halt numerous bilateral dialogue channels is extremely unhelpful."
She added: "At this moment, the United States is showing restraint. There is a lot of blame to go around for this crisis: the United States, Taiwan and China did not handle the Pelosi visit well."
China stopped short of interrupting economic and trade talks, where it is looking to Biden to lift tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump on imports from China.
DIALOGUE CANCELED
On Friday, China's Foreign Ministry said dialogue between U.S. and Chinese regional commanders and defense department heads would be canceled, along with talks on military maritime safety. Cooperation on returning illegal immigrants, criminal investigations, transnational crime, illegal drugs and climate change will be suspended, the ministry said.
China's actions come ahead of a key congress of the ruling Communist Party later this year at which President Xi is expected to obtain a third five-year term as party leader. With the economy stumbling, the party has stoked nationalism and issued near-daily attacks on the government of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, which refuses to recognize Taiwan as part of China.
China sent a force of warships and aircraft into waters and airspace near Taiwan on Friday, defying international criticism of its military exercises and demonstrating the country's growing appetite for confrontation over the island that it claims as its territory.
The military exercise came a day after at least 11 Chinese missiles landed in waters to the north, south and east of Taiwan, driving fears that Chinese forces were practicing for a hypothetical attempt to encircle and attack the island. On Friday, China's military deployed fighter jets, bombers, destroyers and escort ships to waters near the island.
Some of those Chinese warplanes and warships on Friday crossed the informal median line in the Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan's defense ministry said.
Also, mainly symbolic sanctions against Pelosi and her family were announced.
On the China coast, fighter jets could be heard flying overhead, and tourists taking photos chanted, "Let's take Taiwan back," looking out into the blue waters of the Taiwan Strait from Pingtan island, a popular scenic spot in China's Fujian province.
The government's response "makes us feel our motherland is very powerful and gives us confidence that the return of Taiwan is the irresistible trend," said Wang Lu, a tourist from neighboring Zhejiang province.
China is a "powerful country and it will not allow anyone to offend its own territory," said Liu Bolin, a high school student visiting the island.
China's insistence that Taiwan is its territory and its threat to use force to reclaim control have featured in Communist Party statements, the education system and the state-controlled media for more than seven decades since the sides were divided amid civil war in 1949.
Taiwan residents overwhelmingly favor maintaining the status quo of de facto independence and reject China's demands that the island unify with the mainland under Communist control.
The maneuvers, experts said, suggested a plan to blockade Taiwan, which is "quite a bit more than we've seen before," said Andrew Mertha, director of the China Global Research Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "We're seeing what China is capable of doing in a war context."
In the history of U.S.-China relations, "suspension of military discussions is always the first casualty," Mertha added. "It's dangerous simply because it's precisely at crisis moments like this that you have to have clear, uninterrupted lines of communication."
Beyond Taiwan, five of the missiles fired by China landed in Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone off Hateruma, an island far south of Japan's main islands, Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said. He said Japan protested the missiles to China as "serious threats to Japan's national security and the safety of the Japanese people."
Information for this article was contributed by Ellen Knickmeyer, Zeke Miller, David Rising, Huizhong Wu, Mari Yamaguchi, Seth Borenstein and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press, by Yasmeen Abutaleb, Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Ellen Nakashima, Lily Kuo and Christian Shepherd of The Washington Post and by Jane Perlez, Alexandra Stevenson, John Liu and Michael Crowley of The New York Times.
Taiwan Air Force Mirage fighter jets taxi on a runway at an airbase in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Johnson Lai)
Taiwan Air Force Mirage fighters sit on the tarmac at an airbase in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Johnson Lai)
Tourists pose for photos on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Taiwan Air Force Mirage fighter jets taxi on a runway at an airbase in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Johnson Lai)
In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, air force and naval aviation corps of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) fly planes at an unspecified location in China, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Fu Gan/Xinhua via AP)
In this image made from video and released by China's Xinhua News Agency, the air force and naval aviation corps of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducts aerial refueling at an unspecified location in China, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Xinhua via AP)
A fighter jet flies in the direction of Taiwan seen from the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
In this photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, a projectile is launched from an unspecified location in China during long-range live-fire drills by the army of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022. China conducted "precision missile strikes" Thursday in waters off Taiwan's coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tensions in the region to their highest level in decades following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Lai Qiaoquan/Xinhua via AP)
Tourists stand on rocks on the waterfront at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province, Friday, Aug. 5, 2022. China says it summoned European diplomats in the country to protest statements issued by the Group of Seven nations and the European Union criticizing threatening Chinese military exercises surrounding Taiwan. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
A vessel moves through the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China’s Fujian Province on Friday. (AP/Ng Han Guan)